Biden calls Putin’s START suspension a ‘big mistake’

​President Biden called Vladimir Putin’s decision to suspend Russia’s participation in the most recent nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries “a big mistake” as he wrapped up his Eastern European tour by rallying NATO members against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. 

​​“It’s a big mistake,” the president ​told reporters in Warsaw as he headed to a meeting with the so-called Bucharest Nine — the leaders of countries on NATO’s eastern flank who boosted their cooperation on security issues after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

​It was Biden’s first public comment on Putin’s announcement, which the Russian president made a a day earlier in a rambling speech in which he also blamed the US for provoking the war in Ukraine and accused the West and NATO of teaming up to destroy Russia. 

However, Putin stopped short of announcing full Russian withdrawal from the pact.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty​ (START) — which limits the number of nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers that the US and Russia can deploy​ — was initially signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. 

Biden and Putin extended the pact for five years in 2021, shortly before it was set to expire.

Following Putin’s speech Tuesday, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry claimed it would stick to the treaty’s caps on nuclear weapons and continue to exchange information with the US about ballistic missile tests.

But the treaty had already been in jeopardy over accusations that each side was violating the pact, verification difficulties at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and now the fighting in Ukraine, which marks its anniversary Friday.

Last year, Russia refused to engage in talks to resolve disputes over inspections.

In his address to Russia’s Federal Assembly on Tuesday, Putin accused the US and NATO of combining to attack Russian military installations via Ukraine, and cited those attacks as the reason to suspend participation in START.

“The drones used for it were equipped and modernized with NATO’s expert assistance,” Putin said. “And now they want to inspect our defense facilities? In the conditions of today’s confrontation, it sounds like sheer nonsense.”

Putin spoke just about 24 hours after Biden made a surprise visit Monday to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged continued US military support for the country’s fight to repel Russian forces.

On Wednesday, Biden told leaders of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia that they were “the front lines of our collective defense” against Russia.

“You know, better than anyone, what’s at stake in this conflict,” the president added. “Not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the right-wing populist leader who argued last week that the European Union was partly to blame for prolonging the Ukraine war, skipped the Warsaw meeting with Biden, sending President Katalin Novák in his stead.

Still, Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania, insisted Wednesday that “The B9 is stronger than ever.”

As Biden was on the ground in Kyiv, Russia tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to have failed, according to a report on CNN.

The test was of a nuclear-capable heavy SARMAT missile, dubbed Satan II by NATO, and classified as a “superweapon” by the head of Russia’s aerospace research agency.

US officials believe the test failed since Putin did not mention it in his address Tuesday.

With Post wires