Former Russian President, former Prime Minister and current Vice President of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said today that there is no reason to hold talks on nuclear disarmament with the United States and that Moscow will have to wait until the Americans beg for negotiations.
Russia and the United States, by far the largest nuclear powers in the world, have negotiated a series of major treaties to reduce strategic nuclear weapons since Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest disruption in Russia’s relations with the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when many feared that the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Medvedev, as president from 2008-2012, signed the NewSTART (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) in 2010 with Barack Obama in Prague, which was extended in February 2021 for five years until 2026.
“Everything is a deadlock now. We have no relations with the United States right now. They are at zero on the Kelvin scale,” Medvedev told the Telegram about talks on a new strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty.
“There is no need to negotiate with them (about nuclear disarmament) yet. This is bad for Russia,” said Medvedev, who is now Russia’s vice-president of the Security Council. “Let them run or crawl and ask.”
Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, each with about 4,000 warheads in its military stockpile, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Medvedev, who when he was president sought to present himself as a reformer who wanted better relations with the West, hinted that Moscow should become tougher on the United States.
Referring to the shoe incident with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Medvedev said:
“There is another proven method of communicating with America on this issue – with a shoe from the podium at the UN. It worked.”
Outraged by the criticism that the Soviet Union was “swallowing” parts of Eastern Europe, Khrushchev raised a shoe at the General Assembly and, according to a report in the New York Times at the time, struck it on his seat.
Source: AMPE
Source: Capital
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