State Department spokesman Vedant Patel condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 26 televised remarks about the placing of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, during the regular briefing yesterday. “This is the latest example of irresponsible nuclear rhetoric that we have seen from Russia. No other country is inflicting such damage on arms control, nor seeking to undermine strategic stability in Europe. Russia’s decision led to the termination of the INF Treaty in 2019. It recently purported to suspend participation in New START. No other country has raised the prospect of potential nuclear use in connection with this conflict,” he said. “Let’s remember no country is threatening Russia or threatening President Putin. And as the G7 has made clear, any use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in this conflict would be met with severe consequences.”
To which Russian ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov replied: “U.S. officials have an extremely short memory. It is Washington that has long been systematically destroying the legal basis of bilateral relations in strategic sphere. Trying to find a speck in someone else’s eye, they stopped seeing the log in their own eye a long time ago.” Antonov went on to list the 2002 US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and the withdrawals from the INF and Open Skies treaties. “In 2022, the Administration unilaterally ‘froze’ the strategic stability dialogue,” he said. “The U.S. failure to comply with the central limits of New START and its steps to undermine our national security led to our suspension of the Treaty.”
