The decision Putin is certain to regret
By violating the INF Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, from which the United States withdrew in 2019, Putin has opened the door to escalation.
Nuclear proliferation expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, USA, Jeffrey Lewis, tells X: “I have long said that the Russians will regret Vladimir Putin’s violation of the 1987 INF Treaty. He has opened the door to significant deployments of precise, long-range conventional missiles, in Germany and elsewhere.”
Although these missiles are not nuclear and are only a response to Russia’s brutal and expansionist behavior, there is a real risk of escalation. Hans Møller Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, warns: “There is an element of autopilot in this dynamic, because each side uses each other's actions to justify more and more measures to strengthen its military capabilities.”
Because the United States recently announced the deployment of long-range missiles in Germany, the Russian side is likely to retaliate with long-range missiles aimed at Europe.
(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: Korii - Picture: Picture by tatarstan.ru via WikiCommons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license)