WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL security advisor John Bolton is beginning two days of meetings with senior Russian officials following Washington’s weekend announcement of withdrawal from a Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaty. 

The Moscow visit by Bolton was planned before the Saturday announcement by US president Donald Trump that the US was ditching the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as the INF, which Moscow has already denounced as “dangerous”.

The treaty was signed in 1987 by then US president Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who yesterday said that “dropping these agreements… shows a lack of wisdom” and is a “mistake”.

Bolton arrived in Russia yesterday and is set to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev during two days of meetings. 

Tomorrow, he may also speak about the treaty with President Vladimir Putin, according to Putin’s spokesman, who said the Russian leader seeks “clarifications” about US intentions.

Yesterday, Lavrov’s deputy Sergei Ryabkov warned that withdrawal “would be a very dangerous step” and said Washington faced international condemnation in its bid for “total supremacy” in the military sphere.

He insisted that Moscow observed “in the strictest way” the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as the INF, while accusing Washington of “flagrant violations”.

But Trump on Saturday claimed Russia had long violated the treaty.

“We’re the ones who have stayed in the agreement and we’ve honoured the agreement, but Russia has not unfortunately honoured the agreement, so we’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” he told reporters.

“Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years,” he said. 

And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons (while) we’re not allowed to.

The row comes ahead of what is expected to be a second summit between Trump and Putin this year.

The Trump administration has complained of Moscow’s deployment of Novator 9M729 missiles, which Washington says fall under the treaty’s ban on missiles that can travel distances of between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

‘Lamentable consequences’

The INF resolved a crisis over Soviet nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles targeting Western capitals.

The latest rift could have “the most lamentable consequences”, political analyst Alexei Arbatov told Interfax news agency, dragging Russia into a “new cycle of the arms race”.

A Russian foreign ministry official earlier accused Washington of implementing policy “toward dismantling the nuclear deal”.

For many years, Washington has been “deliberately and step by step destroying the basis for the agreement,” said the unnamed official quoted by state news agencies.

The official accused the United States of backing out of international agreements that put it on an equal footing with other countries because it wanted to protect American “exceptionalism”.

Bolton himself is pressuring Trump to leave the INF and has blocked talks to extend the New Start treaty on strategic missiles set to expire in 2021, according to The Guardian newspaper.

The US plan to withdraw from the INF is also targeting China. As a non-signatory, Beijing can develop intermediate-range nuclear weapons without constraints.

US-Russia ties are under deep strain over accusations that Moscow meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The two countries are also at odds over Russian support for the Syrian government in the country’s civil war, and the conflict in Ukraine.

On Friday, the US Justice Department indicted the finance chief of Russia’s leading troll farm for allegedly interfering with US congressional elections to be held in November.

Russia accused the United States of fabricating the charges.

While no new summit between Trump and Putin has yet been announced, one is expected in the near future.

The two leaders will be in Paris on 11 November to attend commemorations marking 100 years since the end of World War I.

© – AFP, 2018