In an interview with TASS, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Nonproliferation and Arms Control Vladimir Yermakov said that Moscow has proposed that the U.S. return all of its nuclear weapons stationed in Europe to American territory and bring an end to NATO’s nuclear sharing program. “We insist that NATO’s ‘joint nuclear missions’ should be stopped immediately, all the American nuclear weapons be returned to US national territory and the infrastructure that allows their rapid deployment should be eliminated. This aspect is one of the elements of the package of measures proposed by us to Washington in the context of considering the issues of security guarantees,” he said. Yermakov noted that the U.S. has some 200 B61 nuclear gravity bombs in European and engages with non-nuclear countries in training to use them against targets on Russian territory.
Yermakov also noted that Russia’s proposals for a mutual moratorium on the deployment of land-based intermediate and shorter-range ballistic missiles is still on the table. If required political decisions are made in favor of such joint efforts, experts could start working on technical issues in depth, he added. A missile crisis cannot be avoided, if efforts fail to ensure restraint and predictability in this sphere, he said.
“The initiatives that we put forward earlier to ensure restraint and predictability in the missile sphere in the wake of the termination of the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty had been ignored for a long time and were actually rejected at the NATO summit in June 2021,” he said. “We keep insisting on the priority task of reaching a fundamental understanding that the problems arising in this sphere should be addressed immediately. Otherwise, new ‘missile’ crises cannot be avoided,” the senior Russian diplomat cautioned.
