Russian President Vladimir Putin has “approved” a plan to develop ground-based intermediate range cruise missiles over the next two years, according to Moscow’s top defense official.
“The use of sea-and air-borne missiles in their ground-based version will help considerably cut the time of manufacturing new missile weapons and the volume of their financing,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters, per state-run TASS. “Besides, it is necessary to increase the firing range of ground-based missile systems being developed today.”
Shoigu’s comments put a clear timeline on Russia’s race to bolster its intermediate-range nuclear forces following President Trump’s decision to begin a U.S. withdrawal from a Cold War era nuclear arms control treaty. The pact banned the development or deployment of the land-based mid-range missiles — which previously had all of Europe on the alert — but Russia has been violating the deal in recent years according to Western officials.
“When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so openly threatened, we must respond,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on Friday. “Russia has jeopardized the United States’ security interests, and we can no longer be restricted by the treaty while Russia shamelessly violates it.”
Russian officials claim the U.S. has been able to circumvent the ban through the deployment of missile defense systems capable of firing similar-range missiles.
“These launchers are similar to the systems that have already been deployed by the Americans in Romania and will be deployed in Poland, the so-called Mk-41 launcher,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday, while discussing the recent expansion of missile defense systems in Japan. “We warned our Japanese colleagues when they were getting involved in this agreement with the U.S. that this would be a violation of the INF Treaty.”
The INF Treaty exempts the missile defense shield from the ban, saying that missiles “of a type developed and tested solely to intercept and counter objects not located on the surface of the earth, it shall not be considered to be a missile to which the limitations of this Treaty apply,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
U.S. officials maintain that Russia is violating the treaty in part because it hampers only the two former Cold War rivals.
“For Putin, this is very much about his neighbors, China being one of them,” a senior administration official told reporters last week.
The civilian chief of NATO believes that Russia developed the missiles in the hopes of being able to threaten a “limited nuclear war” in Europe that doesn’t involve the United States.
“So, these weapons, they can only reach Europe,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the Washington Examiner. “The theory is that you can limit a war because you use weapons which are not aimed at or not capable of reaching the United States.”
