Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that negotiations were not necessary for the US and Russia to extend the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two powers.
New START limits the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems the US and Russia can deploy and is due to expire in February 2026. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to extend the treaty for one year to make room for diplomacy to negotiate a replacement, a proposal President Trump has said was a “good idea,” but so far, there’s no sign the US has formally accepted the offer.
Lavrov said that all that’s needed to extend the treaty is the US’s consent. “We have repeatedly said that our proposal is a unilateral goodwill gesture. No consultations are necessary for the US to support our approach. They just need to say: ‘OK, we will not raise the quantitative levels of the New START within a year,'” the Russian foreign minister said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
The comments about New START come amid heightened nuclear tensions between the US and Russia following President Trump’s public order for the US Department of War to carry out nuclear weapons tests. Lavrov said that Russia still hasn’t received any “clarification” from the US regarding the potential tests.
It was unclear from Trump’s order, which came in the form of a post on Truth Social, if he meant the resumption of tests that involve detonating nuclear warheads, which the US, Russia, and every other nuclear-armed state except for North Korea haven’t done since the 1990s.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright later said that nuclear explosions weren’t on the table, at least for the time being, but the Trump administration hasn’t conveyed that to Moscow. In response to Trump’s post, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his top officials to submit proposals on the possibility of resuming full-scale nuclear weapons tests.
Lavrov said on Tuesday that if the US or any other country conducts such a test, Russia will “do the same.”
