New START Suspension and Arms Control Decay
How to read Moscow's signals on strategic arms control — from Putin's February 2023 New START suspension through the collapse of the Cold War verification architecture.
The February 2023 Suspension and Its Legal Architecture
On 21 February 2023, in his Address to the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was "suspending" — not withdrawing from — the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, signed at Prague on 8 April 2010 and entered into force on 5 February 2011. The Russian State Duma codified the suspension in Federal Law No. 30-FZ on 28 February 2023, and Putin signed it the next day. The MID's accompanying statement of 21 February framed the move as a response to Western support for Ukraine and to alleged threats against Russian strategic facilities, specifically citing the December 2022 Ukrainian drone strikes on Engels-2 air base.
The legal distinction matters. New START contains no suspension clause; Article XIV governs withdrawal with six months' notice on grounds of "extraordinary events" jeopardizing supreme national interests. Moscow's invocation of suspension is therefore an extra-treaty construct, drawing loosely on Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (material breach) without formally citing it. The MID's June 2023 clarification stated Russia would continue to observe the central numerical limits — 1,550 deployed warheads, 700 deployed delivery vehicles, 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers — but would not resume inspections, data exchanges under Part Five of the Protocol, or Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC) meetings.
What Was Already Broken
The suspension formalized a verification collapse already underway. On-site inspections under Part Five had been frozen since March 2020 under a COVID-19 pause agreed by both parties. In August 2022, Moscow unilaterally blocked the resumption of inspections, citing U.S. visa and overflight restrictions. The BCC session scheduled for Cairo in November–December 2022 was postponed by Russia at the last moment — the immediate trigger U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited when, on 1 June 2023, the State Department declared Russia in non-compliance and imposed countermeasures: ceasing biannual data exchanges, denying telemetry, and revoking visas for Russian inspectors.
Read the MID's vocabulary carefully. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov consistently use "приостановление" (suspension) rather than "выход" (withdrawal) or "денонсация" (denunciation). This preserves optionality. Ryabkov's formulation at the 2 June 2023 briefing — that resumption is impossible while the U.S. pursues Russia's "strategic defeat" — links arms control to the broader Ukraine settlement, a linkage Moscow had previously resisted. The 31 March 2023 updated Foreign Policy Concept, paragraph 56, codifies this by listing "strategic stability" among issues requiring a "new equation" reflecting the full spectrum of offensive and defensive arms, third-country nuclear forces (read: UK and France), and missile defense.
The Decay Curve
New START expires on 5 February 2026. No successor negotiation is underway. The pattern of preceding decay is now familiar: the ABM Treaty (U.S. withdrawal, June 2002), the INF Treaty (mutual collapse, August 2019 after the U.S. cited the 9M729/SSC-8 violation), the Open Skies Treaty (U.S. withdrawal November 2020, Russian withdrawal December 2021), and the CFE Treaty (Russian suspension 2007, full withdrawal 7 November 2023, NATO suspension the same day). For analysts reading MID outputs, the question is no longer whether the bilateral strategic arms regime survives 2026 but what — if anything — replaces the data, notifications, and predictability it provided since SALT I in 1972.