patrick.net

Obama knew since at least 2009 but have chosen to turn the blind eye and push for the "reset with dear Blyadimir" instead. Now they cheat on the New START treaty and Potato is again dancing around the issue:

Russia has violated the New START treaty cutting long-range nuclear arms by refusing to allow on-site inspections and rebuffing Washington’s requests to meet to discuss its compliance concerns, the U.S. State Department said in a report sent to Congress on Tuesday.

The State Department’s finding that Moscow is in “noncompliance” with the accord marks the first time that the U.S. has accused Russia of violating the treaty, which entered into force in 2011.

The lack of inspections has also made it harder to verify the number of warheads Russia has deployed under the accord, the State Department added.

...

The Biden administration is eager to preserve the New START treaty, which is the last major agreement regulating the nuclear competition between the two sides, and is pressing Russia to correct the violations.

“There is a clear path to re-compliance here, and we continue to strongly value the treaty,” said a senior State Department official. “Both of these instances of noncompliance are easily remedied.”

....

At the beginning of the Biden administration, both sides seemed eager to safeguard the treaty. President Biden called for a five-year extension of the New START treaty during his first month in office, which was agreed to by Moscow. The agreement caps the number of deployed nuclear warheads and bombs at 1,550 and includes provisions for on-site inspections to verify the treaty’s limits.

Inspections were suspended in March 2020 by mutual agreement after the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. ... When the U.S. sought to resume inspections in August 2022, Russia balked.

Problems worsened when the U.S. sought to discuss its concerns over restoring the inspections at a session of the New START treaty’s Bilateral Consultative Commission, which was established to discuss implementation of the accord.

The meeting was to have been held in Egypt in late November, but Russian officials pulled out at the last minute and haven’t agreed to a new date, which the State Department cites as a second instance of “noncompliance.”

...

But Republican lawmakers warned that the Russian violations might be followed by more substantial breaches of the treaty that would enable Moscow to expand its forces, and said that the Pentagon needed to be ready to adjust the size of the U.S. forces in response.

“There now isn’t a single treaty that Russia has not or is not violating,” said Mike Rogers, the Alabama Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “The Joint Staff needs to assume Russia has or will be breaching New START caps. I want to see the plans for how the U.S. will respond.”

The only way to treat the fuckers is the way Reagan did. Otherwise if you give them a little finger they'll try to take the whole hand.