Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said that Russia would be forced to target any European countries that agreed to host US nuclear missiles following Washington’s withdrawal from a landmark Cold war-era arms control treaty.
Speaking at a news conference after holding talks with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Putin said that he wanted to discuss what he called dangerous US plans to leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with US President Donald Trump.
The two leaders are scheduled to hold talks in Paris on Nov. 11.
Russia has said that Trump’s decision to quit the 1987 treaty, which eliminated both countries’ land-based short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Europe, is “dangerous.”
Trump has accused Russia of contravening the treaty, something that Moscow has denied, saying that Washington was the one contravening it.
US National Security Advisor John Bolton on Tuesday told Putin that Washington would press ahead with plans to quit the pact, despite objections from Russia and European countries.
Putin on Wednesday told reporters that Russia would have to respond in kind and would do so swiftly if the US were to quit the treaty.
“Answering your question directly, can we respond?” Putin said when asked what Russia would do if Trump made good on his pledge to leave the treaty. “We can, and it will be very fast and very effective.”
“If the United States does withdraw from the INF treaty, the main question is what they will do with these [intermediate-range] missiles that will once again appear,” Putin said.
“If they will deliver them to Europe, naturally our response will have to mirror this, and European countries that agree to host them, if things go that far, must understand that they are putting their own territory at risk of a possible counterstrike,” he added.
Putin said he did not understand why it was necessary to put Europe in such danger and it was a situation that Russia itself wanted to avoid if possible.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday accused Russia of breaching the treaty, but said that he did not believe the Russian threat would lead to new deployments of US missiles in Europe.
The EU has described the treaty as a cornerstone of European security, and urged Russia and the US to uphold it, but Stoltenberg did not encourage the US to stay in the treaty.
“I don’t foresee that allies will deploy more nuclear weapons in Europe as a response to the new Russian missile,” Stoltenberg told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
However, the 29 allies are assessing “the implications of the new Russian missile for our security,” he said.
Russia has the option of deploying intermediate-range missiles in its European exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, a move that would put a swath of Europe in range.
Putin said he feared the world might be about to slip into an arms race.
The fate of another arms control treaty between the US and Russia — the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — which governs strategic nuclear missile launchers and is due to expire in 2021, is also unclear.
“If all this is dismantled, then nothing will be left when it comes to limiting the increase in arms,” Putin said. “And then the situation will be, in my view, extremely dangerous. All that will be left is an arms race.”
Additional reporting by AP
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