MOSCOW: Russia offered on Monday to keep abiding by the nuclear warhead limits in a key treaty with the United States once it expires in February, but only for one year and if Washington did the same.

The New START treaty, signed in 2010, is the last remaining nuclear arms reduction agreement between the world’s top two atomic powers and limits the number of nuclear warheads each side can deploy.

However inspections were suspended during the Covid-19 crisis while talks on extending the agreement have broken down in recent years due to tensions over the Ukraine conflict, sparking fears that both sides will breach the limits once it expires.

“Fully abandoning the legacy of this agreement would be, from many perspectives, a mistaken and short-sighted step,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised meeting.

“To avoid provoking a strategic arms race… Russia is prepared to continue adhering to the central quantitative limitations of the New START Treaty for one year after February 5, 2026,” Putin added.

“We believe that this measure will only be viable if the United States acts in a similar manner and does not take steps that undermine or disrupt the existing balance of deterrence potentials,” he said.

Russia froze its participation in New START in 2023 but has continued to voluntarily follow the limits set in the treaty. The agreement restricts both sides to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads each, a reduction of nearly 30 per cent from the previous limit set in 2002.

It also allowed both sides to carry out on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear arsenal, although these were halted during the coronavirus pandemic and have not resumed since. Monday’s proposal from Putin did not provide for a resumption of these inspections, which were central to the original agreement.

Nuclear sabre-rattling

Heloise Fayet, a research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations, said the proposal was Putin’s way of “controlling the narrative” after US President Donald Trump proposed denuclearisation talks with Russia and China.

She also linked the offer to Trump’s plans to build a massive air-defence shield covering the United States, dubbed the “Golden Dome”. “It’s something the Russians do not want. What the Russians are implying is that if the Golden Dome project gains credibility, if the Americans commit to it, there will no longer be any limitations under New Start,” she said.

Anti-proliferation talks between Russia and the United States, which together control more than 80 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, have deteriorated in recent years. In 2019, the two countries withdrew from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

Concluded in 1987 by then-US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the agreement limited the use of medium-range missiles, both conventional and nuclear.

In 2023, Putin signed a law revoking Russia’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, although Moscow said it would stick to the moratorium on atomic testing.

Russia has also been accused of nuclear sabre-rattling since sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Days after launching the assault, Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2025