In his annual speech, Putin promotes Russian escalation.

“Russia suspends its participation in the New Start treaty,” the Kremlin leader declared in his state of the nation address. He blamed the West, as usual.

New Start is Russia and America’s last remaining nuclear arms control treaty. It restricts the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

But there was more to it.

The Russian president said he had signed a decree on “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat standby duty.”

He threatened that Russia would resume nuclear weapons testing.

“Of course, we will not be the first,” Putin added. “However, if the US conducts tests, we will as well.”

“This is more about nuclear blackmail, but it is hazardous,” believes Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “because we cannot predict how Putin will behave in the future and what is in his mind.

“It’s better to have a framework in place to avoid nuclear war,” he added.

The New Start treaty, signed in 2010 by two then-presidents, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, was intended to prevent nuclear war. It restricts the number of strategic nuclear warheads each country can deploy and gives each country the authority to inspect the other.

The agreement was enacted in 2011 and was extended ten years later, even though the Covid pandemic hampered weapons inspections.

Each side has a limit of 1,550 long-range nuclear warheads, which is lower than the previous Start agreement.

The two former Cold War adversaries control nearly all of the world’s nuclear weapons. Despite hostile rhetoric on both sides during the Ukraine war, Russia had previously stated that it wished to keep the treaty in force.