Cold War-era missile agreements are back on the agenda and could provide badly needed peace deal negotiation middle ground
Restarting talks on renewing the Cold War missile treaties is one of the best options of kicking off serious peace negotiations between Russia and the West and now its back on the agenda.
Any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine will turn on the form of the security guarantees to end the conflict in Ukraine that are currently being drawn up. But not only is Russia and Ukraine far apart on the terms, there is a fundamental rift between Europe and the US: the E3 leaders want a US “backstop” to any deal, whereas the Trump administration don’t want to be involved at all, although US President Donald Trump has recently softened his position a little, suggesting the US might provide supplies and intelligence to back Europe up.
Discussions continue, but all sides remain far apart on the shape and terms of a potential deal. However, the issue of arms control is one area where a lot of overlap remains.
Russia has about 4,300 stockpiled and deployed nuclear warheads and the United States has about 3,700, a total of about 87% of the world's total inventory, according to research by the Federation of American Scientists, Reuters reports. China is the world's third largest nuclear power with about 600 warheads, followed by France with 290, and Britain with 225.
Trump the peacemaker
Talk of limits on the number and deployment of nuclear weapons was pushed to the back burner after ceasefire talks kicked off in Riyadh on February 18. But Trump said that he would like to see the number of nuclear weapons reduced early in his presidency.
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said in February. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons… We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things.”
Trump added that he wanted to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defence budgets in half.
Russian President Vladimir Putin too has shown himself extremely keen to restart these agreements. The roots of the current conflict began in 2002 when former US President George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the key ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) that was originally signed in 1972 in Moscow by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, and is the bedrock of the Cold War missile controls. The Kremlin had previously described the treaty as the “gold standard” of arms control.
The Kremlin protested loudly at the end of the ABM treaty and even Joe Biden, who was a senator then, objected to the move, calling it “destabilising.” The US, and then Russia, withdrew from a slew of other agreements in the following years, heightening tensions and pushing Russia to rearm as a Cold War II got under war.
However, hopes that cycle might be broken came in 2021 with the election of Biden, who in his first week in office met with Putin in Geneva and renewed the START missile treaty in January of that year. The Russian side immediately suggested launching talks to renew the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INS Treaty) which the US pulled out of in 2019 during Trump’s first presidency. It didn’t happen. In the meantime, relations between the US and Russia decayed quickly as tensions over Ukraine grew.
Arms controls back on the table
Now a discussion over restarting arms controls is back on the table. Trump said this week he would be interested in negotiating a new arms control agreement to replace the extended START Treaty, which is due to expire in February next year, according to a senior Pentagon official.
“[US] President [Donald Trump], at his core, is a negotiator, and he is interested in making the world safer. I'm sure he would love to do a deal, but that deal has to have certain criteria,” said Lieutenant General Andrew Gebara, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration at the US Air Force, speaking on the treaty’s looming expiration.
The original START Treaty was signed in 2010 and was extended by five years by Putin and Biden. It limits both Moscow and Washington to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, although Putin suspended, not cancelled, Russia’s participation due to the war in Ukraine in 2022.
Gebara said once those restrictions expire, “the Pentagon will be prepared to increase the number of deployed nuclear warheads at [Trump’s] decision.” But he added that expansion is not inevitable.
“The president may or may not elect to keep our numbers where they are, or he may change those numbers. We train and are prepared to add to those numbers, if ordered to do so. If not, then we won't. It's that simple,” Gebara said.
Arms controls were included in the agenda in Anchorage Trump admitted, Reuters reports, and that China should be involved too, with the ultimate aim of "denuclearization" Trump said. Just a day before his meeting with Trump, Putin also suggested that Moscow and Washington could reach a deal on nuclear arms control.
The proposals come at a time when both sides have been rattling their nuclear sabres. Last year Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear first strike by amending Russia's nuclear doctrine. This year Trump sent two nuclear-enabled submarines to “appropriate regions” in response to nuclear threats made by former President Dmitry Medvedev.
The promotion of missile controls up the agenda is new. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has clearly said that the Kremlin is not interested in the simple 30-day unconditional ceasefire that Trump proposed in February, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been pushing for. Lavrov said the Kremlin would prefer a much wider reset of East-West security relations that Putin has also alluded to in his constant refrain of the need to deal with the “root causes” of the current conflict. The big surprise in Anchorage was that Trump also changed his tune and dropped the idea of a ceasefire in favour of more permanent, but harder to do, peace deal negotiations.
In his debriefing of other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders, Putin said that the discussions with the United States were aimed at creating "the long–term conditions of peace between our countries, in Europe, and in the world as a whole, if we reach agreements in the field of strategic offensive arms control in the next stages."
Putin kicked this trope off with his famous Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech where he complained about Nato's expansion up to Russia’s borders and warned that he would “push back” if nothing changed.
Nothing changed. Russia broke off diplomatic relations with Nato in October 2021. As part of that process Lavrov gave his famous “new rules of the game” speech delivered in February 2021 that marked the start of the inevitable slide into war a year later.
Grand plan
Russia has already made one attempt to reset relations with the West with an offer for a new post-Cold War, pan-European security deal in 2008, presented by then President Dmitry Medvedev during his first foreign trip to Brussels. The plan, still on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website, ironically would have prevented the Ukrainian war, but was rejected out of hand.
Now it appears that the Kremlin would like to revive this initiative. There has been much discussion about providing Ukraine with security guarantees, but so far it has been limited to Europe, particularly the coalition of the willing, with a possible US “backstop.”
Lavrov has repeatedly said that any security guarantees that do not include Russia will not be acceptable. He has proposed instead a deal that is overseen by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and includes China – echoing the terms of the 2008 proposal.
Lavrov says that security cannot be “unilateral” and that the final arrangement must be based “on the principles of indivisible security.” That means the West cannot advance its own security at the expense of Russia’s, which Putin argues the West has been doing since the end of the Cold War with Nato’s encroachment to its very borders.
Critics say this would give Moscow a de facto veto over any Western military response to a possible second Russian invasion, but it is also very similar to the new post-Cold War deal that Russia suggested in 2008. The flaw with the current security arrangements, enshrined in Nato membership, is that Russia is excluded from the alliance, which by default makes Russia an enemy and thus undermines Russia’s security. Any new arrangement, Lavrov argues, needs to take Russia’s security fears into account, as the proposed renewed bilateral missile agreements would do.
Gebara remains upbeat about the possibility of restarting missile control talks. “I would just say it's important for us to remember [that] some of the arms control treaties in history were done at some of the hottest times of the Cold War. So, I don't think it's true to say that, because of the current international situation, there's no hope for arms control.”
Nato-lite
In the meantime, one of the half-way-house options on the table is Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s suggestion of offering Ukraine a Nato-lite deal; not full Nato membership, but where European allies offer bilateral security arrangements where they promise to come to Ukraine’s military aid should Russia invade for a second time.
“The Italian proposal, based on a mechanism inspired by Article 5 of the Nato Charter [on collective defence], is now the main one in the discussions,” she said last week, as quoted by TASS.
“Putin has not, and will not, abandon Moscow’s reddest of red lines. He will not compromise on the demand that Nato never expand to Ukraine,” said Ted Snider, a columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com. But now some wiggle room has appeared, as While White House officials have said that Putin is open to allowing Meloni’s Article 5-like arrangement following the Alaska summit.
The Kremlin hasn’t confirmed this is the case but a similar concession was at the core of the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal that the Kremlin says is the format it would like to follow in the current negotiations. That deal failed because former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Europe would not sign any bilateral security deals with Ukraine and to “fight on.”
The debate continues. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said last week that security guarantees for Ukraine would consist of two stages – a peace agreement and support from Europe and the United States.
According to the Financial Times, Western countries have created a rough plan for providing military support to Ukraine after the peace treaty is signed. The plan includes a demilitarized zone (DMZ) that will be patrolled by peacekeeping forces from a third country. Then Ukrainian troops armed and trained by Nato troops will be deployed. And the third line is a “reassurance” force led by Europe, although the size of this force remains a subject of discussion: originally it was suggested it would include 30,000 European troops, but more recently that number fell to 6,000.
Russia remains adamantly opposed to any Nato-backed troops on Ukrainian soil. Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on August 28 that Russia has a “negative attitude” towards the deployment of troops by European countries in Ukraine as part of security guarantees.
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