Russia confirms readiness as nuclear arms treaty nears expiration

Russia's arms control envoy confirmed that Moscow is fully prepared for a world without nuclear limitations as the New START treaty reaches its scheduled expiration on February 5. The statement marks not the failure of diplomacy, but the formal acknowledgment of a structural reality that has been building for years: the bilateral arms control architecture of the Cold War cannot survive in a multipolar nuclear age.

The expiration ends more than fifty years of continuous bilateral strategic nuclear limits between Washington and Moscow. What dies with New START is not merely a set of numerical caps on warheads and delivery systems, but the entire verification and transparency framework that transformed the US-Russia nuclear relationship from pure strategic guessing to managed competition. The shift from verified certainty to intelligence-driven opacity carries consequences that extend far beyond the two original signatories.

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Both powers suspended on-site inspections and data exchanges in 2023, effectively gutting the treaty's verification mechanisms long before its formal death. In September 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a one-year mutual adherence to New START limits as a confidence-building measure. The Trump administration's response was dismissive. "If it expires, it expires," Trump stated, signaling Washington's strategic assessment that the treaty had become a liability rather than an asset.

Russia's confirmation of readiness comes with no indication of panic or regret. Moscow has positioned itself as the responsible party willing to extend constraints, while simultaneously preparing its strategic forces for an unconstrained environment. The posture serves dual purposes: maintaining Russia's self-image as a great power peer to the United States, while ensuring its nuclear modernization programs face no artificial constraints as the new era begins.

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The new normal

The post-New START world will be defined by strategic opacity and unconstrained modernization. The framework that channeled US-Russia nuclear competition for half a century is gone, replaced by a multipolar environment where three major powers build arsenals according to their own threat assessments, not negotiated limits. Russia's statement of readiness is simply an acknowledgment of what the structural conditions have already made inevitable. The question now is not whether the old system can be salvaged, but how the new one will stabilize—if it stabilizes at all.