MOSCOW, February 21. /TASS/. Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START treaty) should prompt the US to give thought to the destabilizing consequences of Washington's involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, the Deputy Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Valdai discussion club expert Dmitry Suslov told TASS on Tuesday.
"The idea is to wake the United States up and start an internal discussion about the destabilizing consequences of the hybrid war it is waging against Russia. To make it realize that its policy towards the Ukrainian conflict is the main threat to strategic stability," the expert noted.
Suslov hopes that Russia’s decision will have a stabilizing effect in the long term.
"Full implementation of New START in the current situation would create the false impression that everything is normal in the field of strategic stability and in fact legitimize the US hybrid war against Russia. Washington would have the delusion that it can continue in the same fashion. This is dangerous from the point of view of nuclear escalation," Suslov said.
"It would be categorically unacceptable to continue to give the impression of normality in the field of strategic stability at a time when the United States creates risks of a nuclear war with Russia. Moscow has at least shattered this false impression of normality. It warned that the situation is not normal and that US policy is fraught with nuclear war," the analyst believes.
Suslov predicts that Washington would react negatively to this decision by Russia and suspend participation in the New START, too.
"The United States will try to shift the responsibility for the ongoing destruction of the architecture of strategic stability to Russia," he said. "It will argue that Washington was prepared to implement New START in full, while Russia did not want to and allegedly destroyed the treaty. But this is hypocrisy."
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin in his message to the Federal Assembly said that Russia was suspending its participation in New START, but not pulling out of it altogether. He stressed that before resuming discussions on further work within the framework of the treaty, Russia would like to clarify how the arsenals of other NATO nuclear powers - Great Britain and France - would be counted in the treaty alongside the US’ nuclear potential.