Source: NBC News
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Saturday that his country will suspend a key Cold War-era missile treaty with the United States following the Trump administration’s move to withdraw a day earlier.
“We will respond quid pro quo,” Putin said during a televised meeting with foreign and defense ministers.
“Our American partners have declared that they suspend their participation in the deal, we suspend it as well.”Putin said Russia will start work on creating new missiles, including hypersonic ones, and told ministers not to initiate disarmament talks with Washington, accusing the U.S. of being slow to respond to such moves.
Putin said that Russia will not increase its military budget for the new weapons and it won’t deploy its weapons in Europe and other regions unless the United States does so.
“We must not and will not be drawn into a costly arms race,” he said.
President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. would be pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, blaming Russia for breaching the pact.
“We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other,” Trump said in a statement.
Moscow has denied the allegations while accusing Washington of violating the treaty and calling for inspections of U.S. arms.
The 1987 treaty, signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, bans deployment and required the destruction of ground-based missiles with a range of between 310 to 3,410 miles. The pact mitigated weapons that had become a point of crisis during the Cold War and has been viewed for decades as a model for arms control agreements between major powers.
The U.S. has claimed since 2014 that Russia was violating the deal, and senior Trump administration officials said on Friday they had tried 35 times through diplomatic engagements to bring Russia back into compliance.
“We provided Russia…
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