MOSCOW, May 29. /TASS/. Russia will make decisions on its intermediate-range and shorter-range missile systems depending on the actions of NATO, and the alliance’s aggressive steps could accelerate the country’s momentum, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters.
"Announcements that the relevant research work and, in principle, a set of measures to create such systems were made several years ago. I think that NATO’s increasingly aggressive manifestations toward us and the need to give them, these manifestations, the harshest possible response in this area can have a certain impact in terms of accelerating the schedules, you know, moving the schedules forward, not back," he said.
Representatives of some Western countries have recently said their weapons that are supplied to Ukraine can be used to strike inside Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the right to self-defense allows Ukraine to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia.
The INF Treaty was terminated on August 2, 2019 at US initiative.
Washington explained its decision by Russia's refusal to comply with the US ultimatum to destroy the 9M729 cruise missiles, which the US and its NATO allies said violated the treaty. Moscow rejected these accusations, saying that the technical specifications of the 9M729 missiles were within permissible parameters, and made its own complaints to Washington.
In September 2019, it became known that Russian President Vladimir Putin had sent a proposal to leaders of several countries, including NATO member countries, to introduce a moratorium on the deployment of INF in Europe and other regions. The US later effectively rejected the idea.