US seeking ‘unipolar world’ in nuke treaty pullout, Kremlin charges
Russian official says Washington has been destroying basis for agreement prohibiting missile development for several years; lawmaker calls it blow to world stability
MOSCOW, Russia — Washington’s move to pull out of a landmark nuclear weapons treaty with Russia is motivated by a dream of a single global superpower, Russian state news agencies on Saturday cited a foreign ministry source as saying.
“The main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No,” a foreign ministry source told RIA Novosti state news agency.
The official said that Russia has “many times publicly denounced the US policy course towards dismantling the nuclear deal.”
Trump announced the withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Saturday and said Russia has violated the agreement, but he provided no details on the violations.
“They have been violating it for many years,” Trump said after a rally in Elko, Nevada. “And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to.”
The 1987 pact, which helps protect the security of the US and its allies in Europe and the Far East, prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing or test-flying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles.
Washington “has approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step by step destroying the basis for the agreement,” the Russian official said, quoted by Russia’s three main news agencies.
“This decision is part of the US policy course to withdraw from those international legal agreements that place equal responsibilities on it and its partners and make vulnerable its concept of its own ‘exceptionalism’,” the official said.
Russian senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was “the second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world” with the first being Washington’s 2001 withdrawal from the Anti- Ballistic Missile treaty.”
“And again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the US,” Pushkov wrote.
