US keeps quiet about its plans for nuclear arms deployment: Russia

Moscow: Washington intentionally keeps quiet about its plans for the deployment of new nuclear weapon systems, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a commentary this week following the release of the US Department of State’s report entitled 2021 Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.

“The report says nothing about the tectonic shifts in the field of European security resulting from the expansion of NATO’s military-strategic infrastructures towards Russian borders and the United States’ own plans for deploying new nuclear weapons,” she said.

Zakharova said that US arms control-related charges against Russia were devoid of any foundation and merely served as a cover for Washington’s own destructive actions. The Russian Foreign Ministry slammed as cynical the Department of State’s approach to the problem of non-strategic nuclear weapons.

“Serious analysis of the situation in this sphere is unseemly replaced by attempts to accuse Russia, although it consistently keeps all non-strategic nuclear weapons undeployed in its national territory, of departing from the 1991-1992 presidential initiatives, which are entirely voluntary,” the commentary runs.

The Russian Foreign Ministry drew attention to what it described as “stereotyped” accusations Russia is in breech of the Open Skies Treaty, which are meant to “exclusively camouflage one’s own destructive actions” regarding this agreement.
“We provided exhaustive answers in response to all claims and after the US pullout from the Open Skies Treaty we find it redundant to make any further comments,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Also, the Russian side expressed surprise over those paragraphs of the report which mention Washington’s strict compliance with the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) and Russia’s alleged failure to observe the nuclear tests moratorium.

The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to the lack of any convincing proof in the report. “These outspokenly false accusations in combination with the total blackout regarding problems with Washington’s own compliance with arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation treaties unmistakably indicate that this report belongs with the information noise class,” Zakharova said.