The Council of the State Duma of the Russian Federation at its next meeting will discuss the issue of revoking ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The head of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, wrote about this in a telegram. It follows from his words that ratification will be revoked: according to Volodin, this “corresponds to national interests.”
Volodin referred to President Vladimir Putin’s speech at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club. At that meeting on October 5, Putin said there was no need to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine, but that he might consider withdrawing ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty because the United States had not ratified the treaty. The final decision, according to Putin, rests with the State Duma.
The pro-presidential United Russia party has a majority in the Duma; all other factions also support Putin’s foreign policy. Almost no one votes against on foreign policy issues.
Volodin also justified the need to cancel ratification with the assertion that “Washington and Brussels unleashed a war against our country.”
Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the withdrawal of ratification does not mean Moscow’s intention to conduct nuclear tests.
Since the beginning of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, various pro-Kremlin politicians and public figures, and sometimes directly government officials, have spoken about the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons or at least resuming nuclear testing. Recently, attention has been drawn to the statements of Putin’s friend, head of the Kurchatov Institute Mikhail Kovalchuk, who proposed testing nuclear weapons on Novaya Zemlya (where explosions were carried out in Soviet times), as well as the head of RT Margarita Simonyan, who proposed organizing a nuclear explosion over Siberia.The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was adopted by the 50th session of the UN General Assembly in 1996. It did not come into force because not enough countries signed it. Of the nuclear powers, India, Pakistan and North Korea have not signed the treaty, while the United States and China have signed but not ratified.
In modern Russia, nuclear tests related to the explosion of a real nuclear charge have not been carried out. In the USSR, the last test was carried out in 1990. In February of this year, Vladimir Putin said that Russia would not resume nuclear tests unless the United States resumed them.
Source : OZODI
