Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev gave a substantive interview to Kommersant’s senior correspondent Elena Chernenko, on the topic of the looming START deadline, which had last been negotiated and signed by then-President Medvedev and his American counterpart Barack Obama in 2010.
Kommersant points out that if the U.S. fails to respond seriously to Putin’s proposal to extend it for one year, “Moscow and Washington will be without arms control agreements for the first time in over half a century, and without any negotiating process to develop any new ones.”
Medvedev said that in the beginning, “New START,” as it was called, fulfilled its purpose in creating predictability and stability, although the Russian side had some “complaints against the American side regarding specific provisions of the treaty.” He said that problems emerged, not due to the quality of the treaty, “but in the irresponsible U.S. approach to its implementation and to the entire Russian-American relationship,” leading Russia to suspend New START in 2023.
As far as resuming substantive agreements on arms control, Medvedev said, “Above all, a basic normalization of Russian-American relations is necessary. After all, under Biden, they have deteriorated to a level significantly worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
He added, “We see that the new U.S. administration is attempting to rethink the reckless and extremely risky course of the previous American administration, which sought to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on our country. This is a shift in the right direction, but the progress is still very slow. We are only at the beginning of the journey; success is not yet guaranteed. This is especially true given that Donald Trump is inherently unstable in his political orientations.”
