Russia says it has the right to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea: reports

Moscow: Russia has the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday.

Mikhail Ulyanovsk, the head of the ministry’s department on arms control, added that he knew of no plans to do so.

Obama Administration Ignores Russian Nuclear Violations

The United States has always failed to understand Soviet strategy and mindset. They sign treaties not because they will abide by them, but because they know the United States will.

“Treaties are like pie crusts, they are made to be broken” – Vladimir Lenin

Russia is covertly developing and testing nuclear missiles in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Obama administration to date has failed to hold Moscow accountable, according to arms control specialists.

“The Russians have basically violated every major treaty they’ve ever entered into, certainly every major weapons treaty,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. He is also a leader of a Senate arms control group.

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The Free Beacon first reported in October that a Russian test of a new missile, the RS-26, violated the INF treaty. The accord prohibits ballistic missiles with ranges of 5,500 kilometers (3,415 miles) or less, and cruise missiles with ranges less than 500 kilometers (310 miles).

Treaty Cheating — Russia said to be violating 1987 missile accord

Disguising stronger ICBMs as weaker ICBMs with less capability is the case here — and America is falling for it. While the U.S. continues to “reset”, the neo-Soviet Union continues to restart.

“Treaties are like pie crusts, they are made to be broken” – Vladimir Lenin

Russia is engaged in a major violation of the terms of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the United States by building a new medium-range missile banned under the accord, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Disclosure of the treaty violation comes as President Barack Obama last week called for a new round of arms negotiations with Moscow aimed at cutting deployed nuclear warheads by one-third.

Intelligence officials said internal assessments identified Russia’s new Yars M missile that was tested earlier this month as an INF missile with a range of less than 5,500 kilometers.

“The intelligence community believes it’s an intermediate-range missile that [the Russians] have classified as an ICBM because it would violate the INF treaty” if its true characteristics were known, said one official.

Stalin’s Shadow over the Post-Reset Meeting Between Putin and Obama

The Group of Eight (G8) summits have traditionally been seen more for their vanity than substance, and the one that opens today (June 17) in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, will not be an exception. The members of this privileged club—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia—see no particular need to overcome their differences in managing the world’s slow-burning crises, from the economic slowdown to Syria. Besides the photo-ops, the main content of these tightly scripted get-togethers is supposed to be generated in the back rooms, and the most private of those is this time reserved for the meeting between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which should have happened a year ago, had Putin not opted to skip the May 2012 G8 summit in Camp David. The key figures in the Obama administration have far outdone their Russian counterparts in preparing an agenda for this tete-a-tete but succeeded only in downplaying the criticism of Putin’s persecution of political dissent, while no breakthrough in arms control is in the making (Kommersant-FM, June 14). Expectations that Russia could show some flexibility on Syria are arrested by the long-postponed announcement in Washington on providing military aid to the rebels. And what little understanding there was on issues looming over the wider Middle East is shattered by Putin’s statement that he has “no doubt that Iran is compliant with the rules” in executing its nuclear program (Gazeta.ru, Moscow echo, June 14; Forbes.ru, June 12).

Disarming America

State Department advisory board urges deeper nuclear force cuts including unilateral reductions

A State Department board of experts is calling for steep cuts in U.S. nuclear forces beyond the New START treaty limits and recommends unilateral or informal reductions to avoid expected Senate ratification battles.

“Treaties are an important but not always necessary method for reducing nuclear arsenals,” the new report by the International Security Advisory Board says. “The United States has reduced its nuclear arsenal without negotiating a new treaty in the past—both unilaterally and reciprocally with Russia.”