What does Russia's proposal for voluntary compliance with the New START mean?

The New START Treaty expires on February 5, 2026. RUSSIA is ready to comply with it for at least another year after that date, Vladimir Putin stated , but only if the United States agrees to do the same . Read more in RBC's article: Vladimir Putin at a meeting with permanent members of the Security Council in the Kremlin, Moscow. What Moscow is proposing.

Russia is prepared to comply with the Treaty on the Further Reduction of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) after its final expiration on February 5, 2026, President Vladimir Putin stated at a meeting of the Russian Security Council on September 22. With the expiration of this treaty, Moscow and Washington will no longer have bilateral documents that legally limit their nuclear arsenals.

The HEAD of state explained that completely abandoning this document "would be, from many perspectives, a mistaken and short-sighted step." Therefore, "in order to avoid provoking a further strategic arms race and to ensure an acceptable level of predictability and restraint," Moscow considers it important to maintain the status quo established by the New START.

"Therefore, Russia is prepared to continue adhering to the central quantitative limitations of the START Treaty for one year after February 5, 2026," the Russian leader said, citing the condition that the United States, as the other party to the treaty, must "act in a similar manner" and not take "steps that undermine or violate the existing balance of deterrent potentials."

After February 5, 2027, Moscow will decide whether to maintain these "voluntary self-restraints." Putin announced that he had instructed the relevant ministries to continue monitoring the United States' compliance with the New START Treaty. Particular attention should be paid to their plans to develop missile defense systems, including those Washington plans to deploy in space. Such actions, Putin noted, could "nullify Russia's efforts" to maintain the status quo. If this happens, Moscow will respond "appropriately."

"I believe that the implementation of Russia's initiative could make a significant contribution to creating an atmosphere conducive to substantive strategic dialogue with the United States of America," the Russian president concluded. "Naturally, this would require formulating the conditions for its full resumption and taking into account the full range of efforts to normalize bilateral relations and eliminate fundamental security contradictions."

The Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) is an agreement between Russia and the United States that outlines how the parties will reduce their strategic offensive arms. The document was signed in 2010 in Prague by Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama. It entered into force on February 5, 2011; ten years later, it was extended for another five years, with no further extensions provided. The New START Treaty expires on February 5, 2026.

The New START Treaty applies to the following categories of weapons: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), their launchers (PU) and warheads; submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), their launchers and warheads; heavy bombers and their nuclear armament.

Russia and the United States have set the following ceilings for these weapons:

• 700 pieces for deployed ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers;
• 1550 for warheads on deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and nuclear warheads assigned to heavy bombers;
• 800 pieces for deployed and non-deployed launchers of ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers.

What is the current situation with the New START Treaty?

After Russia and the United States extended the New START Treaty in 2021, they began discussing its successor. With the outbreak of full-scale hostilities in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States announced its refusal to engage in dialogue with Russia, and contacts on strategic stability were frozen. A year later, Putin announced in his address to the Federal Assembly that Moscow was suspending its participation in the New START Treaty. He linked this move to the conflict in Ukraine—specifically, the supply of Western weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the West's assistance in carrying out strikes on Russian strategic air bases.

The concept of "suspension" does not exist in the New START Treaty, so the United States called Russia's decision "legally incorrect" and stated that it would continue to consider Russia bound by its obligations under the treaty. Effective June 1, 2023, Washington ceased sharing information with Moscow about the status and location of its strategic weapons.

In June 2023, the Biden administration proposed a dialogue with Russia in a so-called compartmentalized mode, meaning without linking it to other international issues on which the two countries disagree. Russia responded that it would not discuss strategic stability in isolation from the overall context, including Ukraine. As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stated, arms control "does not exist in a vacuum, and the possibilities for its 'compartmentalization' have objective limits."

Donald Trump , upon returning to the White House, called for resuming negotiations with Russia. However, as of September 2025, this had not been accomplished.

What does Putin's proposal mean?

Experts interviewed by RBC believe that, given that extending the New START Treaty is no longer technically feasible and negotiations on a new agreement are nonexistent, the proposal for voluntary self-restraint is an option that puts Russia in a winning position. Building up strategic weapons is not in the interests of either Moscow or Washington, explained Pavel Podvig, head of the Russia's Strategic Nuclear Weapons Project and a senior research fellow at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (Geneva), as it would draw them into a costly arms race.

"The statement is aimed at somehow containing this arms race. This is especially true given that a consensus is emerging in the US that the number of deployed warheads needs to be increased to counter two opponents at once—Russia and CHINA," the expert told RBC. "In this situation, when Russia proposes not to increase its arsenal, it finds itself in the position of peacemaker. This is a rather good position—there are no downsides to such a proposal."

Washington has not yet responded to Moscow's proposal. "For now, it looks like a unilateral initiative that the US could informally join," says Dmitry Stefanovich, a research fellow at the Center for International Security at the IMEMO RAS and co-founder of the Vatfor project. "I believe the essence of the statement is to demonstrate Moscow's willingness to exercise a certain amount of 'self-restraint' in the strategic offensive arms sphere. This is a good gesture, even somewhat unexpected, and it returns the initiative to Russia in this area. At least among arms control advocates, this has already been viewed positively."

It's difficult to say whether the US will agree to the proposal. "On the one hand, it's not as if all is well in the area of ​​strategic offensive weapons, especially the development and deployment of advanced systems," Stefanovich explained. "On the other hand, the Golden Dome project has been launched, which includes the deployment of space-based interceptors, and this issue is explicitly addressed in the presidential statement. Again, China won't be able to restrain itself."

The treaty's particular value was given by its monitoring and verification system—the parties had clear procedures for verifying their compliance with the New START requirements . A verbal agreement or mutual promise doesn't provide for such mechanisms. "You can, as they say, take someone's word for it: 'We're not increasing, and you're not increasing.' But without an agreement and regulated procedures, this arrangement will be very vulnerable to attack," Podvig notes. "That is, it will be very easy to accuse the other side of non-compliance, and there will be no way to prove the inconsistency of these accusations. So it's in everyone's interest to have such a system of verification, data exchange, and inspections. Restoring it to the form it existed before 2023 without a treaty will be extremely difficult, if not impossible."

Verification within the framework of the New START Treaty provides for the following mechanisms.

• Exchange of notifications (Article VII of the Treaty and Chapter 4 of its Protocol) through national nuclear risk reduction centers. Parties are obligated to notify each other of any changes regarding weapons covered by the Treaty, from their destruction in accidents and dismantlement to their movements and launches.
• Mutual inspections (Article XI and Chapter 5 of the Protocol) at ICBM bases, submarine moorings, and air bases to confirm the accuracy of declared information on the numbers and types of strategic offensive arms covered by the Treaty.

To resolve contentious issues, Russia and the United States created the Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC) with a meeting place in Geneva.

According to the US State Department, as of February 1, 2023, during the treaty's term, the parties exchanged 25,449 notifications, conducted 328 inspections, and held 19 BCC meetings.

Mutual inspections were suspended in 2020 during the pandemic.covid-19 . They never resumed. The next BCC meeting, at which the US wanted to discuss inspections, was scheduled for early December 2022 in Cairo, but the day before the meeting, Moscow announced that it was being postponed indefinitely.