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U.S. Will Pull Out Of Nuclear Arms Treaty With Russia – Trump
U.S. President Donald Trump said Saturday he will exit a landmark arms control agreement the United States signed with the former Soviet Union, saying that Russia is violating the pact and it’s preventing the U.S. from developing new weapons.
Known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the 1987 pact, which helps protect the security of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Far East, prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing or test-flying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of between 500 and 5,500 km (311 and 3,418 miles).
“Russia has violated the agreement. They have been violating it for many years,” Trump said after a rally in Elko, Nevada. “And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to.”
The agreement has constrained the U.S. from developing new weapons, but America will begin developing them unless Russia and China agree not to possess or develop the weapons, Trump said. China is not a party to the treaty and has invested heavily in conventional missiles as part of an anti-access/area denial strategy.
“We’ll have to develop those weapons, unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and say let’s really get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons, but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it, and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable,” he said.
National security adviser John Bolton was headed Saturday to Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. His first stop is Moscow, where he’ll meet with Russian leaders, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. His visit comes at a time when Moscow-Washington relations also remain frosty over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race and upcoming U.S. midterm elections.
There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin or the Russian Foreign Ministry on Trump’s announcement.
But Russian Sen. Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was “the second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world” with the first being Washington’s 2001 withdrawal from the Anti- Ballistic Missile treaty.”
“And again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the U.S.,” Pushkov wrote.
Bolton himself is pressuring Trump to leave the INF and has blocked any negotiations to extend the New Start treaty on strategic missiles set to expire in 2021, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Trump didn’t provide details about violations, but in 2017, White House national security officials said Russia had deployed a cruise missile in violation of the treaty. Earlier, the Obama administration accused the Russians of violating the pact by developing and testing a prohibited cruise missile. Russia has repeatedly denied that it has violated the treaty and has accused the United States of not being in compliance.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has previously suggested that a Trump administration proposal to add a sea-launched cruise missile to America’s nuclear arsenal could provide the U.S. with leverage to try to convince Russia to come back in line on the arms treaty.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in February that the country would only consider using nuclear weapons in response to an attack involving nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or in response to a non-nuclear assault that endangered the survival of the Russian nation.
“We are slowly slipping back to the situation of cold war as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, with quite similar consequences, but now it could be worse because (Russian President Vladimir) Putin belongs to a generation that had no war under its belt,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent Russian political analyst. “These people aren’t as much fearful of a war as people of Brezhnev’s epoch. They think if they threaten the West properly, it gets scared.”
Trump’s decision could be controversial with European allies and others who see value in the treaty, said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who focuses on nuclear arms control.
“Once the United States withdraws from the treaty, there is no reason for Russia to even pretend it is observing the limits,” he wrote in a post on the organization’s website. “Moscow will be free to deploy the 9M729 cruise missile, and an intermediate-range ballistic missile if it wants, without any restraint.”
U.S. officials have previously alleged that Russia violated the treaty by deliberately deploying a land-based cruise missile in order to pose a threat to NATO. Russia has claimed that U.S. missile defenses violate the pact.
In the past, the Obama administration worked to convince Moscow to respect the INF treaty but made little progress.
“If they get smart and if others get smart and they say let’s not develop these horrible nuclear weapons, I would be extremely happy with that, but as long as somebody’s violating the agreement, we’re not going to be the only ones to adhere to it,” Trump said.
US President Donald Trump said he was sending a delegation to Pakistan on Monday for negotiations with Iran, while renewing his threats to destroy the country’s vital infrastructure if it didn’t agree to a deal.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” the American leader declared on Sunday in a post on his Truth Social account, saying that without a deal, Washington was “going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran”.
Iran and the United States, along with Israel, are three days away from the end of a two-week ceasefire that halted the Middle East war started by surprise US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.
There has so far been only a single, 21-hour negotiating session held in Islamabad on April 11 that ended inconclusively, though groundwork for fresh talks continued afterwards.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it,” Trump said in his post.
No date has yet been announced for a second round of talks, and Iran’s speaker of parliament and senior negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf insisted on Saturday night that the two sides were “still far from the final discussion”.
Trump justified the war as an attempt to stop Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons — an ambition it has always denied — and the atomic issue remains a key sticking point in negotiations.
Iran and the US had already been discussing Tehran’s nuclear programme in Oman-mediated talks when Washington launched the war, which has now added a fresh point of contention — the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for oil and gas shipments that Iran has ordered closed.
Police personnel keep watch at a closed road leading to the Serena Hotel in the Red Zone area of Islamabad on April 19, 2026.
A second round of talks between the United States and Iran is expected in Islamabad this coming week.
In Islamabad, security had been visibly stepped up on Sunday ahead of the expected talks.
Authorities announced road closures and traffic restrictions across the city, as well as in neighbouring Rawalpindi.
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AFP journalists saw armed guards and checkpoints near Islamabad’s most secure hotels — the Marriott and the Serena.
“Citizens are earnestly requested to cooperate with the security agencies,” a city official posted on X.
The US president said his negotiators, whom he didn’t name, would arrive in the Pakistani capital on Monday evening.
The previous delegation was led by Vice President JD Vance and included Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who led the aborted pre-war talks.
A major sticking point of negotiations has been Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium.
Trump said on Friday that Iran had agreed to hand over its roughly 440 kilogrammes of enriched uranium. “We’re going to get it by going in with Iran, with lots of excavators,” he said.
But Iran’s foreign ministry has said the stockpile, thought to be buried deep under rubble from US bombing in last June’s 12-day war, was “not going to be transferred anywhere”, and surrendering it “to the US has never been raised in negotiations”.
On Sunday, President Masoud Pezeshkian questioned why Iran should give up its “legal right” to a nuclear programme.
– Hormuz closed again –
An oil tanker of CPC Corporation is docked at Keelung Port on March 11, 2026. Oil prices held around 100 USD on March 13, and most equity markets dropped after Iran’s leader called for the blocking of the crucial Strait of Hormuz (Photo by I-Hwa Cheng / AFP)
Tehran moved to close off the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas travel in peacetime, at the start of the war, hammering the global economy and roiling markets.
Having failed to force it open again, Trump countered with a US naval blockade on Iranian ports in an attempt to cut off Tehran’s oil revenues.
Iran briefly reopened the strait on Friday in recognition of an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in Lebanon, but closed it again the following day in response to the US maintaining its blockade.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that any attempt to pass through the strait without permission “will be considered cooperation with the enemy, and the offending vessel will be targeted”.
“If America does not lift the blockade, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz will definitely be limited,” Ghalibaf said.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei on Sunday said the blockade was “a violation” of the ceasefire and illegal collective punishment of the Iranian people.
A handful of oil and gas tankers had crossed the strait early on Saturday during the brief reopening, but by early Sunday morning, tracking data showed the waterway empty of shipping.
The afternoon before, a trio of incidents demonstrated the dangers of any attempted crossing.
A UK maritime security agency said the Revolutionary Guards fired at one tanker, while security intelligence firm Vanguard Tech reported the force had threatened to “destroy” an empty cruise ship that was fleeing the Gulf.
In the third incident, the UK agency said it received a report of a vessel “being hit by an unknown projectile, which caused damage” to shipping containers but no fire.
Trump said of the incidents: “That wasn’t nice, was it?”
Pope Leo XIV said Saturday he regretted remarks he made were interpreted as a response to criticism from President Donald Trump, insisting he had no interest in debating the US leader.
An example was a speech about “tyrants” ransacking the world that he delivered in Cameroon on Thursday, on the second leg of a tour of Africa, Leo told journalists as he travelled to Angola.
The remarks had been written well before Trump’s “comment on myself and on the message of peace that I am promoting,” he said.
“And yet it was perceived as if I were trying to start a new debate with the president, which doesn’t interest me at all,” Leo said.
“Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said,” he said.
Leo had blasted “tyrants” ransacking the world on Thursday while on a high-security visit to Cameroon’s northwestern city of Bamenda, the epicentre of a nearly decade-long English-speaking separatist insurgency that has killed thousands.
The remarks were interpreted by the US media in particular as a reference to Trump.
But they were written well before Trump’s criticisms, Leo said, adding “there’s been a certain narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects”.
Trump had said on April 12 he was “not a big fan of Pope Leo”, and accused him of “toying with a country (Iran) that wants a nuclear weapon”.
He later doubled down on his comments to reporters with a post on Truth Social, saying: “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”
“Pope Leo is weak on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the US leader said.
AFP
Pope Leo XIV on Friday warned against the use of AI to fan “polarisation, conflict, fear and violence” and criticised the “environmental devastation” caused by the extraction of rare earths to fuel the digital boom.
The challenge posed by these systems is greater than it appears: it is not just about the use of new technologies, but about the gradual replacement of reality by its simulation,” he said in a speech at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaounde, Cameroon.”In this way, polarisation, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”
It marks the pontiff’s latest outspoken intervention on a landmark 11-day tour of Africa that has seen him abandon his previous restraint to deliver impassioned pleas for world peace — and tussle with fellow American Donald Trump, after the US president lashed out at him for calling for an end to the war in the Middle East.
While Leo has called for caution on AI several times since his election in May 2025, his latest warning about the technology comes as the US president faces increasing scrutiny over his use of AI.
After the pope criticised the US-Israeli war with Iran, Trump on Sunday posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a saint with a glowing halo. The image was taken down on Monday.
Leo conceded that “Christians, and especially young African Catholics, must not be afraid of new things”.
But the continent “also knows the darker side of the environmental and social devastation caused by the relentless pursuit of raw materials and rare earths”, he added.
The AI boom is largely reliant on the extraction of cobalt needed to run energy-hungry data servers, with Africa often bearing the environmental, social and human cost of mining.
Notably, competition for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s rich veins of cobalt, copper, lithium and coltan has fuelled a spiral of violence in the mineral-rich east that has lasted three decades.
According to the US Geological Survey, the country supplied more than three-quarters of the world’s cobalt production in 2024.
“Africa needs to be freed from the scourge of corruption,” Leo said, taking aim at a graft-riddled mining industry where foreign powers — China foremost among them — reap the riches of the continent’s wealth while the local populations suffer.
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