The United States and Russia are making tit-for-tat moves with their participation in a nuclear treaty, something politicians and analysts see as a burgeoning arms race.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Saturday that Russia is suspending its participation in the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Russian move follows a similar action Friday by the U.S.

“The American partners have declared that they suspend their participation in the deal, we suspend it as well,” Putin said in a televised address Saturday.

Putin said that Russia will start work on creating new missiles, including hypersonic ones. He told his foreign and defense ministers not to initiate disarmament talks with Washington.

​US suspends compliance, blames Russia

In a statement Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. is suspending its compliance with the decades-old treaty, accusing the Kremlin of willfully breaking the deal.

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity, covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad,” Trump said.

“We will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions,” he added.

But later Friday, speaking to reporters, Trump left open the possibility of some sort of deal.

“I hope that we are able to get everybody in a very big and beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better,” he said. “Certainly, I would like to see that. But you have to have everybody adhere to it.”

China’s foreign ministry said Saturday that Beijing is opposed to the U.S. withdrawal action and urges the United States and Russia to handle their differences through constructive dialogue.

WATCH: US to Leave Treaty Signed by Reagan and Gorbachev

The INF treaty, signed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1987, was the world’s first arms control pact to prohibit an entire class of weapons, banning ground-launched cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.

INF violations

Yet the U.S. has been become increasingly vocal about what it says are Russia’s blatant violations.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials charge those violations date back to at least 2014, when Russia began deploying its 9M729 missile, following years of tests designed to skirt the treaty’s constraints.

Now, officials say, Russia is fielding multiple military battalions that are equipped with the missile in question.

“We must respond,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Friday. “We can no longer be restricted by the treaty, while Russia shamelessly violates it.”

“We provided Russia an ample window of time to mend its ways and for Russia to honor its commitment. Tomorrow that time runs out,” he said.

Saturday the U.S. will provide the Kremlin and other former Soviet States with formal notice of its intent to withdraw from the INF Treaty, triggering a six-month window.

Officials say if Moscow refuses to verifiably destroy the missiles, as is expected, the treaty will terminate, and the U.S. will be free to pursue its own intermediate range, ground-launched ballistic or cruise missiles.

​Russian denial

Russian officials reacted quickly Friday to the announcement, denying any treaty violations, while alleging it is Washington that wants to expand its missile arsenal.

The U.S. withdrawal deals “a serious blow to the international arms control system and the system of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which exist for now,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters.

Ryabkov also suggested other arms control agreements, like the New START treaty, which limits both countries to fewer than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, could also be in jeopardy.

“What will come next is a huge question,” the deputy foreign minister told Russian television. “I fear that the New START may share the fate of the INF Treaty. It may just expire on Feb. 5, 2021, without an extension.”

New arms race?

But U.S. officials held firm, insisting the onus is on the Kremlin to ease tensions.

“Let’s be clear. If there’s an arms race, it is Russia that is starting it,” senior administration official said Friday.

“We simply cannot tolerate this kind of abuse of arms control and expect for arms control to continue to be viable,” the official said. “We cannot permit a scenario where we are unilaterally bound to a treaty, we are denied the ability to have a military capability to deter attacks.”

Concern, support for US action

In a statement issued shortly after the U.S. announced its plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty, NATO said its members “fully support this action.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter:

At the United Nations, officials expressed concern.

“For the Secretary-General, his hope [is] that the parties will use the next six months to resolve their differences through dialogue,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. “The INF is a very important part of the international arms control architecture.”

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty also garnered a mixed response from U.S. lawmakers.

“Russia’s repeated violations over the years demonstrate that the INF is no longer in the best interest of the United States,” the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, said in a statement.

But the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was wary.

“The Trump administration is risking an arms race and undermining international security and stability,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“Russia’s brazen noncompliance with this treaty is deeply concerning,” she said. “But discarding a key pillar of our nonproliferation security framework creates unacceptable risks.”

Few good choices

Still, some analysts caution that Russian President Putin has given the U.S. and its European allies few good options.

“Putin’s decision to build weapons that violate this important arms control treaty is another of his attacks on the peace in Europe,” according to Jorge Benitez, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Russia is an aggressive military,” he said. “Europe needs to strengthen deterrence to further dangerous behavior from Moscow.”

The U.S. has already started spending on such deterrence — $48 million on research to develop its own intermediate-range, ground-launched missiles. And officials say there have already been some initial discussions with allies.

​No nukes

“We are some time away from having a system that we would produce, that we would trains soldiers or airmen or Marines to deploy,” a senior administration official said, adding that for now nuclear-armed missiles were not under consideration.

“We are only looking at conventional options at this time,” the official said. “Nothing the United States is currently looking at is nuclear in character.”

The pursuit of the new missiles, though, could also give the U.S. additional options in countering growing threats from China and Iran.

Neither Beijing no Tehran were subject to the INF Treaty, and U.S. officials believe both countries have more than 1,000 intermediate-range, ground-launched missiles in their arsenals.

But some experts warn any increase in the number of such missiles, by the U.S. or Russia, will only escalate missile production and tensions in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific.

VOA United Nations Correspondent Margaret Besheer and VOA’s Wayne Lee contributed to this report.
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With the government open again, President Donald Trump at last headed Friday for a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago private club on Florida’s southeastern coast.

Trump typically spends many winter weekends at the Palm Beach estate, golfing at another nearby private club he owns and dining on an outdoor terrace at Mar-a-Lago, where he catches up with friends and club members.

But that routine was interrupted by the partial government shutdown, which ended a week ago after a record 35 days.

The president curtailed his travel during the shutdown, dropping Mar-a-Lago from the itinerary as he sought to avoid travel that would not play well when one-fourth of the government was closed and hundreds of thousands of federal workers had to make do without pay.

As a fresh layer of snow blanketed the nation’s capital Friday, Trump and his wife, Melania, arrived at their estate after dark. Their son, Barron; the president’s oldest daughter, Ivanka; her husband, Jared; and the first lady’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knav, also made the trip.

Supporters awaiting Trump’s arrival at the airport cheered loudly and began chanting “USA” as he exited Air Force One.

Last trip in November

It had been more than two months since Trump visited Mar-a-Lago, which he calls the “winter White House.”

He flew down a few days early for Thanksgiving for a stretch in which in which he indulged in daily golf, his “primary form of exercise,” including a round with professional golfer Jack Nicklaus and Nicklaus’ son and grandson. Trump spoke on the holiday with U.S. service members stationed around the world and dropped in on a nearby U.S. Coast Guard station.

After the shutdown began just before Christmas, Trump canceled his 16-day holiday at Mar-a-Lago and remained at the White House, where he often posted complaints on Twitter about being alone in the mansion and waiting for Democrats to come over and negotiate a deal for the billions of dollars he wants to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Canceling the vacation also meant skipping out on his duties hosting an annual New Year’s Eve bash at the Florida estate.

But this weekend, Trump will resume his hosting duties at an annual Super Bowl watch party at his private golf club in West Palm Beach.

Trump is due to return to the White House late Sunday. 
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The Trump administration is poised to announce Friday that it is withdrawing from a treaty that has been a centerpiece of superpower arms control since the Cold War and whose demise some analysts worry could fuel a new arms race.

An American withdrawal, which has been expected for months, would follow years of unresolved dispute over Russian compliance with the pact, known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty. It was the first arms control measure to ban an entire class of weapons: ground-launched cruise missiles with a range between 500 kilometers (310 miles) and 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles). Russia denies that it has been in violation.

U.S. officials also have expressed worry that China, which is not party to the 1987 treaty, is gaining a significant military advantage in Asia by deploying large numbers of missiles with ranges beyond the treaty’s limit. Leaving the INF treaty would allow the Trump administration to counter the Chinese, but it’s unclear how it would do that.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in early December that Washington would give Moscow 60 days to return to compliance before it gave formal notice of withdrawal, with actual withdrawal taking place six months later. The 60-day deadline expires Saturday, and the administration is expected to say as early as Friday that efforts to work out a compliance deal have failed and that it would suspend its compliance with the treaty’s terms.

The State Department said Pompeo would make a public statement Friday morning, but it did not mention the topic.

In a tweet Thursday, the chief spokeswoman for NATO, Oana Lungescu, said there are no signs of getting a compliance deal with Russia.

“So we must prepare for a world without the Treaty,” she wrote.

Withdrawal takes six months

Technically, a U.S. withdrawal would take effect six months after this week’s notification, leaving a small window for saving the treaty. However, in talks this week in Beijing, the U.S. and Russia reported no breakthrough in their dispute, leaving little reason to think either side would change its stance on whether a Russian cruise missile violates the pact.

A Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, was quoted by the Russian state news agency Tass as saying after the Beijing talks Thursday, “Unfortunately, there is no progress. The position of the American side is very tough and like an ultimatum.” He said he expects Washington now to suspend its obligations under the treaty, although he added that Moscow remains ready to “search for solutions” that could keep the treaty in force.

U.S. withdrawal raises the prospect of further deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations, which already are arguably at the lowest point in decades, and debate among U.S. allies in Europe over whether Russia’s alleged violations warrant a countermeasure such as deployment of an equivalent American missile in Europe. The U.S. has no nuclear-capable missiles based in Europe; the last of that type and range were withdrawn in line with the INF treaty.

​Global concern

The prospect of U.S. withdrawal from the INF pact has stirred concern globally. The mayor of Des Moines, Iowa, Frank Cownie, is among dozens of local officials and lawmakers in the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere who signed a letter this week to President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin expressing worry at the “unraveling” of the INF treaty and other arms constraints.

“Withdrawing from treaties takes a step in the wrong direction,” Cownie said in a telephone interview. “It’s wasn’t just Des Moines, Iowa. It’s people from all around this country that are concerned about the future of our cities, of our country, of this planet.”

Unleashing new arms race

The American ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, set the rhetorical stage for Washington’s withdrawal announcement by asserting Thursday that Russia has been in violation for years, including in Ukraine. She said in a tweet and a video message about the INF treaty that Russia is to blame for its demise.

“Russia consistently refuses to acknowledge its violation and continues to push disinformation and false narratives regarding its illegal missile,” she said. “When only one party respects an arms control treaty while the other side flaunts it, it leaves one side vulnerable, no one is safer, and (it) discredits the very idea of arms control.”

Nuclear weapons experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a statement this week that while Russia’s violation of the INF treaty is a serious problem, U.S. withdrawal under current circumstances would be counterproductive.

“Leaving the INF treaty will unleash a new missile competition between the United States and Russia,” they said.

Kingston Reif, director for disarmament at the Arms Control Association, said Thursday the Trump administration has failed to exhaust diplomatic options to save the treaty. What’s more, “it has no strategy to prevent Russia from building and fielding even more intermediate-range missiles in the absence of the agreement.”

Reif said the period between now and August, when the U.S. withdrawal would take effect, offers a last chance to save the treaty, but he sees little prospect of that happening. He argues that Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, is “unlikely to miss the opportunity to kill an agreement he has long despised.”
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President Donald Trump is calling bipartisan congressional talks over border wall funding a “waste of time.”

In a White House interview with The New York Times Thursday, Trump again hinted he may declare a national emergency in order to bypass Congress and build the wall without its approval.

“I’ll continue to build the wall and we’ll get the wall finished. Now whether or not I declare a national emergency, that you’ll see … I’ve set the table, I’ve set the stage for doing what I’m going to do.”

Shutdown? National emergency?

If there is no deal on border security in less than three weeks that Trump would sign, there could be another government shutdown.

If Trump does declare a national emergency, Democrats who don’t want any money for a border wall will probably immediately challenge Trump in court.

The president had strong words for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who has said many times that she will not agree to give Trump the $5.7 billion he wants for a wall.

“I think Nancy Pelosi is hurting our country very badly by doing what she’s doing,” Trump said, adding that while he has always gotten along with her, “I don’t think I will any more.”

Pelosi has said she was open to other kinds of barriers along the border, but Trump said that was unacceptable.

​More troops head to border

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it is sending 3,500 more troops to the U.S. southern border with Mexico to assist with border security measures.

Democrat Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, released the latest troop numbers after slamming the Pentagon’s lack of transparency in a letter to Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

A defense official confirmed that the Pentagon was sending 3,500 more active duty troops to the border, for a total of 5,800 active duty troops and 2,300 National Guard troops supporting the Department of Homeland Security’s request for additional border security.

The official, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity, added that this “initial pop” in the number of troops would not be sustained through September.

Some of these 3,500 will be replacing troops who will be leaving soon, while others are only assigned to the border for 30 or 60 days in order to set up large coiled barbed wire in specific areas, according to the official.

​Trump tweets

Without giving any details, Trump tweeted Thursday “More troops being sent to the Southern Border to stop the attempted Invasion of Illegals, through large caravans, into our Country. We have stopped the previous Caravans, and we will stop these also. With a Wall it would be soooo much easier and less expensive.”

Trump, as he often has, claimed erroneously that “Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go.” The U.S. has been repairing existing barriers, which Trump called “a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!”

At various times, Trump has called the barriers at the border an impenetrable concrete wall, and other times “steel slats,” or a see-through barrier, even “peaches,” if people preferred.

But on Thursday, Trump said, “Let’s just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!”

He claimed that Mexico’s soaring murder rate was reason enough to build the wall.

“Very sadly, Murder cases in Mexico in 2018 rose 33% from 2017, to 33,341. This is a big contributor to the Humanitarian Crises taking place on our Southern Border and then spreading throughout our Country. Worse even than Afghanistan. Much caused by DRUGS.”

He said that with the record Mexican murder rate, “why wouldn’t any sane person want to build a wall.
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