President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree enacting Russia’s suspension of the INF Treaty, a move that was announced after a similar decision by the US. The weapons control agreement was set to expire in less than six months.

Russia is putting on ice the Cold War-era agreement, which resulted in significant demilitarization of the European continent. The US will be formally notified about the decision.

The INF Treaty may be revived if the US “eliminates its earlier violations of its obligations” under the deal, according to the decree published by the Kremlin on Monday. Otherwise it will simply expire and cease to exist.

The agreement’s preservation was troubled for over a decade, with both sides complaining about the other not fully complying with its terms. The US claimed Russia secretly developed a missile that violated the INF – an accusation that Moscow denies.

Russia’s had two major complaints. One is the US use of intermediate-range missiles as targets for developing anti-missile technologies, which Russia said still meant that the US deployed and tested banned missiles. The other is the creation of AEGIS Ashore, a ground-based version of the naval system, which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles in addition to missile interceptors. The US insists that AEGIS Ashore launchers in Romania and Poland are purely defensive, but Moscow sees them as potential launching pods for an attack on Russian territory.

Last year the Trump administration announced that unless Russia destroys its stockpiles of the missile, which the US claims to be in violation of the treaty, Washington would withdraw from the INF. With negotiations failing to resolve the situation, the US announced its formal suspension of the treaty in early February.

Russia said it would do the same and accused the US of duplicity, saying Washington was using its claim about the Russian missile as a pretext to abandon the deal, which it no longer finds convenient.

https://www.rt.com/news/452982-russia-suspends-inf-treaty/