The expiration of New START, the last major nuclear arms agreement limiting the United States and Russia, landed on Feb. 5 with sharply different messages from Moscow and Washington. In Moscow, officials said they regretted the pact’s end and framed it as harmful to stability, while U.S. President Donald Trump said he opposed simply extending the existing limits and called for a different arrangement that would involve China.
Russian statements followed a diplomatic sequence described by Kremlin advisers and spokespeople. Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said Putin discussed the expiration with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Wednesday, pointing to the U.S. failure to respond to a Russian proposal to extend New START’s limits for another year. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow viewed the treaty’s expiration “negatively” and expressed regret, while also saying Russia would maintain what he called a “responsible, thorough approach to stability when it comes to nuclear weapons.”
Peskov added that Moscow’s willingness to talk depends on how Washington responds. He said Russia would “certainly conduct a dialogue” if it receives “constructive responses,” and he said Russia would be “guided primarily by its national interests.” Separately, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that even with New START expiring, Moscow “remains ready to take decisive military-technical measures” to counter “potential additional threats to the national security.”
Trump, for his part, used a skeptical framing of New START itself to reject its limits continuing. In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump said: “Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” He also said he wants China included in a new pact, a view that Beijing has rejected, according to the report.
The termination of New START left the United States and Russia without the treaty’s caps on nuclear warheads and delivery systems. New START, signed in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, restricted each side to no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads and no more than 700 missiles and bombers “deployed and ready for use.” The pact was originally set to expire in 2021 but was extended for five more years. The agreement envisioned sweeping on-site inspections, but they stopped in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted activities, and they were not resumed, the report said.
Russia suspended participation in February 2023, saying it could not allow U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites while Washington and its NATO allies have declared Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine as a goal. At that time, Moscow emphasized it was not withdrawing outright and pledged to respect the treaty’s caps while it sought a path forward. Earlier, Putin offered in September to abide by New START’s limits for a year to “buy time” for negotiations on a successor, arguing the treaty’s expiration would be destabilizing and could fuel nuclear proliferation.
Alongside the end of the treaty, U.S. and Russian officials agreed to re-establish high-level military-to-military dialogue, according to the U.S. military command in Europe. The report said the discussions followed a meeting between senior officials from both sides in Abu Dhabi, where the link was described as having been suspended in 2021 as relations deteriorated before Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
The report also described the role China would play—or not play—in any next step. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that Trump has made clear that “in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Thursday that “China’s nuclear forces are not at all on the same scale as those of the U.S. and Russia, and thus China will not participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations at the current stage,” and she said China regrets the expiration of New START.
In Beijing’s messaging, Lin Jian also called on the U.S. to resume nuclear dialogue with Russia soon, and said China urged the U.S. to respond positively to Moscow’s idea that the two sides continue observing the core limits of the treaty for now. Kremlin officials, the report said, reiterated Moscow’s view that Russia’s approach on a broader pact would also require involving other nuclear powers such as France and the United Kingdom, as opposed to limiting discussions to Washington and Moscow alone.
Arms control advocates warned that the expiration could accelerate a new nuclear buildup. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said in remarks quoted by the report that if the Trump administration continues to resist nuclear arms control diplomacy with Russia and increases the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. deployed strategic arsenal, it would lead Russia to follow suit and encourage China to accelerate its strategic buildup. Kimball warned that such a scenario could produce “a years-long, dangerous three-way nuclear arms buildup.”