Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume 11 Number 10 

June 18, 2020 

Russian Arms Control 

Compliance: A Report Card, 

1984-2020 

by Christopher A. Ford 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 

1984-2020 

by Christopher A. Ford1 

Following the public release of the unclassified "Executive Summary" of the 

State Department's 2020 report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms 

Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, 

Assistant Secretary Ford looks back at 35 years of U.S. compliance assessments 

to outline the history of U.S. concerns over Russian/Soviet behavior in this 

arena. In particular, he describes how the history of Moscow's noncompliance 

closely tracks the global security environment's evolution, from Cold War 

tensions to post-Cold War relaxation, and more recently back to competitive 

tension. 

The U.S. Department of State on April 15 transmitted 

to Congress and publicly released an unclassified 

"Executive Summary" of the 2020 edition of the annual 

report on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, 

Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and 

Commitments, more commonly known as the "Compliance 

Report." This Executive Summary is available on the 

website of the State Department's Arms Control, 

Verification, and Compliance (AV() Bureau, which prepares 

the report each year. 2 

This AC/5 Paper offers a look back at more than 35 

years of U.S. compliance assessments that led up to this 

year's Report. In particular, this paper describes how the 

evolution of the global security environment's over the last 

four decades -from Cold War tensions to post-Cold War 

relaxation, and now back to competitive tensions - can be 

seen in the history of Russian, and before that, Soviet, 

noncompliance with arms control agreements and 

commitments recounted in U.S. Compliance Reports from 

1984 to 2020.3 

Compliance by the Soviet Union, and then Russia, with 

its arms control agreements and commitments has 

frequently been quite problematic. A look back at more 

than 35 years of U.S. compliance assessment illustrates 

that Moscow's behavior has varied considerably, 

alternating between periods of what one might describe as 

aggressive noncompliance - in which fidelity to promises 

took a back seat to the pursuit of competitive advantage 

vis-a-vis the United States - and periods in which 

compliance with agreements and adherence to 

commitments improved, and in which the Kremlin was 

increasingly willing to accept meaningful transparency and 

1 Assistant Secretary of State, and performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. 

2 The full unclassified version, with classified annexes, will be transmitted to Congress once these documents complete declassification and 

release review. References to the "2020 Report" in this paper refer to the Executive Summary. 

3 For present purposes, I will refer to all prior reports as "Compliance Reports" - or simply by their date (e.g., the "1991 Report") even though 

their specific titles have varied over time. Early reports were prepared by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), but the State 

Department has prepared them since ACDA was abolished and its functions transferred into the Department in 1999. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

confidence building measures as part of a cooperative 

relationship with Washington.4 

Unfortunately, since the relationship became more 

adversarial in the 2000s, Moscow has moved into a 

renewed period of aggressive competition and 

noncompliance. Across a range of issues, recent 

Compliance Reports demonstrate worsening Russian 

performance in living up to its commitments and 

obligations. At a time in which the United States seeks a 

new trilateral arms control framework that will bring both 

Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC) into an 

agreement that will limit nuclear arsenals in ways that will 

forestall a nuclear arms race, these troubling trends in 

Russian cheating present tremendous challenges. 

If the United States is to build such a path-breaking 

trilateral framework, we must approach this challenge with 

eyes wide open to Moscow's woeful track record of being 

willing to disregard some of its arms control obligations 

and commitments when it perceives itself to be in an 

adversarial relationship with the United States -that is, 

when effective arms control is most necessary. This paper 

aims to help us understand what has come before in order 

to place current arms control debates in historical context 

as we work today to help ensure that the next round of 

arms control is as verifiable and enforceable as possible. 

Not surprisingly, we expect that effective verification 

measures will remain a key objective for next-generation 

arms control. 

I. Window on an Evolving World 

A. Waning Cold War Tensions 

The corpus of Compliance Reports since their 

inauguration in 1984 offers an interesting window into the 

shifting currents of the global security environment that 

the United States has confronted. The early reports 

focused exclusively upon Soviet noncompliance. They are 

important record documents of the United States' arms 

control difficulties with the USSR at the height of the Cold 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

War. As an example, as outlined in the 1984 Report, the 

United States then assessed that the Soviets had 

"maintain[ed] an offensive biological warfare program 

and capabilities and through their involvement in the 

production, transfer and use of toxins and other lethal 

chemical warfare agents ... [and] have repeatedly 

violated their legal obligations under the [Biological 

Weapons Convention] ... " 

It also described Soviet violations of the Anti-Ballistic 

Missile (ABM) Treaty, and violations of both legal 

obligations and political commitments associated with the 

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II). By the 1985 

Report, the United States claimed to have assessed nine 

cases of Soviet violations, including of the Helsinki Final 

Act, the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the Biological and Toxin 

Weapons Convention (BWC or BTW(), and SALT II. 

Moscow's commitment to geopolitical struggle had clearly 

made it dangerously unscrupulous where fidelity to its legal 

obligations and political commitments was concerned. 

Later in the decade, however, the reader can see some 

signs of the general thawing in superpower tensions, and 

lessening of competition-focused Soviet cheating, that 

occurred through the last years of the Cold War. In the 

1988 Report, the United States recounted that the Soviets 

had addressed some initial compliance problems under the 

Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that had 

been raised by U.S. diplomats-albeit without Moscow 

admitting that it had broken the rules. The USSR had also 

permitted transparency visits by a Congressional 

delegation and by a group of U.S. Government experts to 

sites associated with ABM Treaty violations, and had begun 

to offer a few more details about the infamous 1979 

outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk that the United States 

had concluded originated at a Soviet biological weapons 

facility. 

In response to U.S. compliance enforcement pressure 

- including the message delivered to Moscow that "it will 

be impossible to conclude any future agreements in the 

START and Defense and Space areas unless they correct 

the Krasnoyarsk radar [ABM Treaty] violation in a verifiable 

4 Readers of U.S. Compliance Reports should note the distinction now drawn between "compliance" and "adherence." In modern practice, as 

explained in successive editions, "compliance" is used in association with legally-binding obligations-with "noncompliance" being a 

synonym for "violation" -while "adherence" is used in discussing commitments that are merely politically binding. (One can be in 

noncompliance with a Treaty, for instance, but merely in non-adherence to a political commitment.) Early U.S. compliance assessments did 

not make this distinction, with the 1984 Report assessing Soviet "violations" both of legal obligations and of political commitments. 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

manner that meets our criteria" -the 1990 Compliance 

Report reported that 

"our uncompromising demand for strict adherence to 

arms control treaties is yielding positive results. The 

Soviet Union now appears to be willing to take 

significant action to resolve some U.S. concerns .... 

[T]here has been an encouraging change in the Soviet 

approach toward arms control compliance." 

As recounted in that report, Soviet Foreign Minister 

Shevardnadze even admitted that the Krasnoyarsk radar 

was "a clear violation" of the ABM Treaty, and he 

committed his government to eliminate it. And indeed, the 

1991 Report subsequently recounted that the Soviets had 

begun dismantling that facility. 

In 1989, furthermore, the Soviets had also agreed to a 

memorandum of understanding on bilateral declaration 

and inspection of chemical weapons (CW) stockpiles, while 

a Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement had been 

signed in 1988, and a Major Strategic Exercises Agreement 

the following year. The 1993 Report also became the first 

to assess compliance with the START agreement, which 

brought about huge reductions in both superpowers' 

nuclear arsenals. 

B. Post-Cold War Issues 

The range of issues assessed by Compliance Reports 

expanded considerably in the post-Cold War era, and not 

merely because compliance now needed to be assessed for 

the various states that succeeded to Soviet obligations 

upon the breakup of the USSR. The Reports were greatly 

expanded to cover a broad range of weapons of mass 

destruction topics and multilateral agreements, reflecting 

the degree to which -with the bipolar tensions of the Cold 

War having ended -the United States and the rest of the 

international community were coming to focus much more 

upon proliferation challenges. As the 1993 Report 

explained, WMD proliferation had emerged as 

"a major concern to the United States [because] ... a 

number of nations are showing disregard for their 

commitments to arms control prohibitions on the 

development, acquisition, and spread of both 

biological and toxin weapons and nuclear weapons." 

In accordance with a 1994 federal statute, Compliance 

Reports thus began to assess other nations' compliance 

with instruments such as the BWC, Nuclear 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

Non proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the Conventional 

Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Just as earlier 

Reports provided a window upon the evolution of Cold War 

tensions, Reports from the 1990s and 2000s provide a 

window upon the United States' focus upon proliferation 

threats in the post-Cold War era. 

II. Russia in the Post-Cold War Era 

As Russia recovered from the economic and societal 

disruptions of the transition from the Soviet Union, the 

more recent years of the post-Cold War period have failed 

to live up to optimistic hopes that U.S-Soviet tensions 

could be replaced by a new era of great power cooperation. 

This has been a problem more broadly, certainly, but also 

specifically with regard to Russian compliance with 

obligations and adherence to commitments. Despite 

hopes of a new era of cooperation and trust, the Kremlin 

has in recent years sought to restore much of its old sphere 

of influence through the use of blatant military aggression, 

proxy forces, political and military subversion, and the 

manipulation of political, eocnomic, energy, and military 

relationships. As this effort has stepped up, Moscow's arms 

control behavior has again come to raise troubling 

questions. 

A. A Success Story: Strategic Arms 

The area of post-Cold War arms control in which Russia 

has consistently complied with its obligations is that of 

strategic nuclear arms agreements, including the Strategic 

Arms Reduction Treaty (ST ART), the Moscow Treaty of 

2002, and the "New START" agreement-which was 

signed in 2010 and entered into force in 2011, by which 

point Russia was already several years into the process of 

developing its new SSC-8 missile (which the United States 

determined in 2014 to be a violation of the INF Treaty). 

Despite the occurrence of what the 2020 Report describes 

as "implementation-related questions," Compliance 

Reports have consistently reported Russia to be "in 

compliance with the terms of the New START Treaty." 

B. Ambiguous Cases 

1. Plutonium Disposition 

One new issue added to the Compliance Report for a 

time in the post-Cold War period - and the evolution of 

which also provides something of a window into how the 

initial warmth and hope of that period has been replaced by 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

an increasingly problematic geopolitics, as Russian 

behavior has called into question the progress then made 

- is the Plutonium Management and Disposition 

Agreement (PMDA) signed between the United States and 

Russia in 2000. An agreement under which both 

superpowers committed to dispose offissile material 

stocks made superfluous by the disappearance of the Cold 

War need to posture scores of thousands of nuclear 

weapons against each other, the PMDA was a symbol of 

post-Cold War hope and progress. 

Unfortunately, however, the PMDA's fate - as visible 

through the prism of the Compliance Reports - illustrates 

the turn of that post-Cold War optimism back towards 

pessimism and uncertainty in the face of Russia's refocus 

upon competition and antagonism. The PMDA first 

appeared in the 2017 Report after Russia announced its 

decision to "suspend implementation of" the agreement in 

October 2016. The Report noted that this purported 

suspension -which the United States views as having no 

legal effect - was not in itself a violation of the PDMA, but 

that it "raises concerns regarding its future adherence to 

obligations under this Agreement." This conclusion was 

repeated in the 2018 and 2019 Reports. 

2. Missile Proliferation 

Beginning with the 2003 Report, U.S. compliance 

assessments also evaluated adherence to political 

commitments made to the United States on missile 

proliferation, including Russian commitments under the 

Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). The first 

MTCR adherence assessment found Russian entities to 

have been involved in transfers "contrary to the 

non proliferation criteria outlined in the MTCR Guidelines." 

By the 2005 Report, this was apparently somewhat less 

clear, however, with the U.S. assessment observing merely 

that while problematic transfers still occurred, they were 

"not directly precluded by Russia's commitments under the 

MTCR Guidelines." The 2010 Report also noted 

problematic transfers, but stated that "available 

information does not suggest that Russia has acted 

inconsistently with its MTCR commitments." 

C. Problematic Cases 

1. INFTreaty 

The most obvious and significant way in which the 

Compliance Reports have chronicled Russia's shift during 

the Putin era from post-Cold War cooperation into a new 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

era of geopolitically revisionist oppositionalism and arms 

control cheating is in charting Moscow's violation of the 

Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that had 

been signed in 1987 and entered into force in 1988. To be 

sure, some early Reports had recounted problems in the 

initial implementation of INF - as well as U.S. concerns, as 

noted in the 1991 Report, about the USSR's transfer of SS23 missiles to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. 

These problems, however, were all ultimately resolved, and 

for many years the Compliance Reports found no INF 

problems. The 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 Reports, for 

instance, declared that "[t]here have been no [INF] issues 

raised in the intervening period." 

Trouble, however, was coming. As subsequently 

detailed in the 2019 Report, Russia perceived a worsening 

security environment in the early 2000s and became "open 

in its desire to end or change" the INF Treaty by at least 

2004. Russia, in fact, began "the covert development of an 

intermediate-range, ground-launched cruise missile (the 

SSC-8/9M729)" not permitted by the INF Treaty, "probably 

by the mid-20oos." As a result, it was ready to test this new 

cruise missile "in the mid- to late 2000s." As later 

recounted by Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security Rose Gottemoeller, flight tests 

began in 2008 for the missile now known as the SSC-8, 

which the Oba ma Administration determined in 2014 to be 

an INF Treaty violation. 

The United States first raised compliance concerns 

about this missile directly with the Russians in May 2013, to 

no avail. This INF problem was first voiced publicly in the 

2014 Report, which found Moscow to be in violation of the 

Treaty. Russia denied any violation, and its work on the 

SSC-8 continued unabated, proceeding from illegal flight 

testing through the completion of development, into fullscale manufacturing, and ultimately to deploying multiple 

battalions of the missile. Every Compliance Report since 

2014 has described the Russian violation. 

As a consequence, as recounted in the 2020 Report, 

U.S. officials in 2018 formally declared Russia to be in 

material breach of the INF Treaty and announced a 

suspension of Treaty obligations, which took effect in 

February 2019, at which time the United States also 

declared that it would withdraw in six months if Russia did 

not return to compliance. When Russia did not, the United 

States duly withdrew from the Treaty. In reports from the 

1988 Report through the 2020 Report, therefore, U.S. 

officials chronicle the full lifetime of the INF Treaty, from its 

hopeful beginnings through years of successful 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

implementation, and then to decay and collapse in the face 

of Russian cheating. 

2. Chemical Weapons Convention 

The Compliance Reports first began to mention 

chemical weapons (CW) issues as the United States and the 

Soviet Union began to share data on chemical stockpiles at 

the end of the Cold War. The Reports did not focus 

significantly upon CW, however, until after the Chemical 

Weapons Convention (CWC) entered into force in 1997. 

Despite the early optimism associated with early 

transparency and cooperation measures such as in the 

Wyoming Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 

regarding a bilateral verification experiment and data 

exchange on CW, however, the modern reader can discern 

signs of Russian CW compliance problems to come. 

In the 1993 Report, for instance- released the day 

after the CWC had been opened for signature in January of 

that year-the United States called attention to published 

allegations of Moscow's development of a "new chemical 

weapons binary nerve agent" said to be more effective than 

VX. This was the first mention in the Compliance Reports 

of what would subsequently be known much more widely 

as Russia's fourth-generation "novichok'' nerve agents. 

That Report made clear that "[t]he United States does not 

have sufficient information to address the accuracy of 

these reports," but it expressed concern about them. 

Perhaps not by coincidence, the 1994 Report drew 

attention to the fact that the Wyoming MOU's 

transparency measures included what that report 

described as a requirement to provide a full list of CW 

types, "to include any new binary chemical agent they had 

produced." 

The 2003 and 2005 Reports found Russia to be in 

violation of the CWC because its CWC declarations were 

"incomplete with respect to CW production, development 

facilities and chemical agent and weapons stockpiles." For 

a time thereafter, the reports used different language, but 

the United States still continued to find that it could not 

certify Russia was in compliance with the CWC. For 

example, as the 2010 Report put it, the United States was 

"unable to ascertain whether Russia's CWC declaration is 

complete." The U.S. compliance assessments sharpened 

notably once more after Russia used a novichok nerve 

agent in an attempted assassination in Britain in March 

2018. While that reckless attack failed to kill the intended 

target, it did tragically lead to the death of another UK 

citizen, vividly illustrating that Russia's CWC violation poses 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

a direct threat to the security of U.S. and Allied citizens. 

The 2020 Report, for instance, notes that 

"Russia is in non-compliance with the CWC for its use 

of a military grade nerve agent in an assassination 

attempt on UK soil. This attack indicates Russian 

retains an undeclared chemical weapons program. The 

United States cannot certify that Russia has met its 

obligations for complete declarations of its [CW 

production and development facilities, and] CW 

stockpiles . ... Furthermore, the United States has 

concerns that Russia's pharmaceutical-based agents 

(PBAs) program is for offensive purposes." 

3. Biological Weapons 

The issue of Soviet (and then Russian) biological 

weapons (BW) capabilities has been a major focus of 

concern throughout the lifetime of the U.S. Compliance 

Report process. It had been a staple of mid-198os 

reporting going back to the 1984 Report, for instance, that 

the Soviet Union maintained an offensive BW program, 

and this was still being assessed as late as the 2005 Report 

-which declared that "[t]he United States judges based on 

all available evidence that Russia continues to maintain an 

offensive BW program in violation of the Convention." 

Though the assessments' language has changed over 

time, Russian activities relevant to the BWC have remained 

a significant U.S. concern across administrations. For 

example, the 2010 Report found that 

"[a]vailable information during the reporting period 

indicated [that] Russian entities have remained 

engaged in dual-use, biological research activities. 

There were no indications that these activities were 

conducted for purposes inconsistent with the BWC. It 

remains unclear, however, whether Russia has fulfilled 

its BWC obligations in regard to the items specified in 

Article I of the Convention that it inherited." 

In the years that followed, the finding further 

highlighted that 

"Russia previously acknowledged both that it is a BWC 

successor state and that it inherited past Soviet 

offensive programs of biological research and 

development. Russia's annual BWC CBM submissions 

since 1992 have not satisfactorily documented 

whether this program was completely destroyed or 

diverted to peaceful purposes in accordance with 

Article II of the BWC." 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

Most recently, the Executive Summary of the 2020 

Report states at the unclassified level that "[f]or this 

reporting period, available information does not allow the 

United States to conclude that the Russian Federation 

(Russia) has fulfilled its Article II obligation to destroy or to 

divert to peaceful purposes BW items specified under 

Article I of its past BW program." 

4. Conventional arms control 

Conventional arms control analysis had appeared 

fleetingly in the early Reports, with the 1984 Report, for 

instance, finding that the Soviet Union had violated the 

transparency and confidence-building provisions of the 

Helsinki Final Act by failing to give notification of its 

"Zapad-81" exercise. But conventional arms control 

questions only began to appear regularly in the Compliance 

Reports in the post-Cold War era, after instruments such as 

the CFE Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies, as well as the 

Vienna Document's confidence and security building 

measures (CSBMs) had been put in place. 

As in some other aspects of the Compliance Reports, 

however, conventional arms compliance reporting in recent 

years has reflected Russia's turn to geopolitical revisionism 

under Vladimir Putin and his efforts to re-litigate the postCold War settlement that left Moscow shorn of most of the 

Soviet Union's former imperial sphere of influence.5 The 

2010 Report noted that Russia had declared the purported 

"suspension" of its CFE obligations in 2007, though no such 

suspension was legally available. The result was that 

Russia was "in noncompliance with its Treaty obligations" 

thereafter, and this assessment has been unchanged 

throughout more than a decade since. The 2020 Report 

repeats this conclusion, noting that 

"[s]ince its 'suspension,' Russia has continued to 

violate its [CFE] Treaty obligations and has made clear 

that it will not resume implementation of the Treaty . ... 

In addition, Russia's stationing of forces on the 

territories of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine without 

the host country's consent continued through 2019." 

With regard to the Vienna Document, Russia adheres 

to some of its commitments, but successive Compliance 

Reports have detailed a number of failures. Russia has also 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

tried to avoid notifying other participating States of 

military exercises involving as many as 100,000 troops, on 

the implausible grounds that such enormous exercises 

were undertaken on a "snap" basis (i.e., undertaken 

without prior notice to the troops involved). In some 

instances, Russia's conduct has raised questions as to 

whether it properly notifies even non-"snap" exercises. 

Every Compliance Report since the 2015 Report has 

described Russia as having engaged in "selective 

implementation of some provisions" of the Vienna 

Document. The United States, with its Allies and partners, 

have tabled a comprehensive proposal to modernize the 

Vienna Document to address modern day security realities, 

but Russia has refused to discuss such modernization. 

Russia has also flagrantly and repeatedly violated its 

obligations under the Open Skies Treaty. That Treaty was 

built on President Eisenhower's vision of a confidencebuilding regime in which each superpower demonstrates to 

the other that it had nothing to fear because no area was 

off-limits to peaceful image-collecting overflights. Russia, 

however, has engaged in multiple violations of its Open 

Skies obligations since the Treaty entered into force -

including through such things as limiting flight distances for 

observation flights over the militarized Russian enclave of 

the Kaliningrad Oblast between Poland and Lithuania, 

periodically imposing airspace rules or restrictions not 

permitted under the Treaty (such as on flights over 

Chechnya), and denying a flight over military exercise in 

September 2019. 

Russia's demonstrable willingness to impose illegal 

restrictions on Open Skies flights whenever it wishes has 

undermined the confidence-building purposes of the 

Treaty. Other aspects of Russia's Open Skies 

implementation, though never included in a Compliance 

Report as violations, have also undermined the Treaty's 

effectiveness as a confidence-building measure. Russia 

may, for instance, be using imagery gathered on Open 

Skies flights to support its new doctrine of targeting U.S. 

and European critical infrastructure targets with 

conventionally-armed, precision-guided missiles. 6 It has 

also used airfield designations and illegal overflight 

restrictions in an attempt to advance what are, in effect, 

propaganda statements in support of Vladimir Putin's 

policy of regional belligerence, claiming that the Georgian 

s Russia had ratified the 1999 adapted CFE Treaty in 2000, but the United States and other NATO states did not do so on account of Russia's 

continuing lack of fulfilment of the parallel Istanbul commitments. 

6 Russian compliance with this provision has not been assessed in a Compliance Report, but it is worth pointing out that Article IX of the Open 

Skies Treaty makes clear that imagery "shall be used exclusively for the attainment of the purposes of the Treaty." 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are "independent 

states" rather than part of the sovereign territory of 

Georgia, and that Crimea is part of Russia rather than part 

of the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Such efforts to 

"weaponize" and inject propaganda narratives into the 

Open Skies Treaty have undercut its effectiveness as a 

confidence-building mechanism. 

The 2005 Report was the first to report on Open Skies 

after the Treaty's entry into force in January 2002, but even 

then there were complaints about Russia's compliance, at 

that point related to the improper provision of airspace and 

airfield information. (By contrast, an initial Open Skies 

compliance difficulty with Ukraine was reported to have 

been resolved.) The 2010 Report, however, made clear 

that Russia's Open Skies problems were only worsening -

recounting that "[d]uring the period from 2004 through 

2008, the Russian Federation's airspace restrictions on 

Open Skies observation flights operating in Russia were not 

in compliance with the provisions of the Treaty." 

All Compliance Reports from 2014 through 2019 

detailed a variety of impermissible Russian restrictions on 

overflights and other problems with Treaty 

implementation, some of which were resolved and two of 

which have continued. These problems persisted, and are 

reflected in the 2020 Report, additionally recounting a new 

Open Skies violation in Russia's denial of a planned flight 

segment over the "TSENTR" military exercise in 2019. 

These chronic problems with Russian compliance with 

and implementation of the Open Skies Treaty led directly 

to the United States' decision in 2020 that it is no longer in 

America's interest to remain a party to the Treaty. As a 

result of Russian behavior, the United States therefore 

announced on May 22 that in accordance with the Treaty's 

terms, it was notifying the depositaries of its decision to 

withdraw-which will take effect on November 22. (U.S. 

officials made clear that the United States reserved the 

right to reexamine this decision until the withdrawal 

became effective, but that they would only consider this 

were Russian behaviorto improve significantly.) 

5. Presidential Nuclear Initiatives 

For the first time in an unclassified Compliance Report, 

the 2020 Report describes U.S. concerns with whether 

Russia has in fact carried out the commitments it made in 

1991 and 1992 in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNls) 

to, among other things, eliminate various "tactical" nuclear 

weapons for its ground forces. The Executive Summary of 

the Report declares: 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

"The United States assesses that Russia is not adhering 

to all of its PNI commitments . ... Russia's efforts to 

retain dual-capable non-strategic systems for its 

ground forces are inconsistent with its PNI pledge to 

eliminate nuclear warheads for such systems .... [T]he 

United States assesses, ... that Russia no longer feels 

bound by its PNI pledge to eliminate [such 

warheads]. ... " 

This 2020 finding reinforces the conclusion already voiced 

in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review that "Russia is in 

violation of its international legal and political 

commitments that directly affect the security of others, 

including ... the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives." (It 

also amplifies the April 2006 comment by then-U.S. 

Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and 

Nonproliferation Stephen Rademaker that "Russia has not 

completely fulfilled the Russian side of the Presidential 

Nuclear Initiatives.") This represents yet another way in 

which the Russian Federation's turn to geopolitical 

revisionism has undermined the arms control enterprise 

and led Moscow into a generalized policy of selective 

indifference to its legal obligations and its political 

commitments. 

6. NuclearTesting 

Though they have only returned to unclassified 

Reports in recent years, nuclear weapons testing issues 

actually have a long history in U.S. Compliance Reports. 

The issue of nuclear testing arose in the 1984, 1985, and 

1988 Reports, in connection with the Threshold Test Ban 

Treaty (TTBT). (That instrument had not yet entered into 

force, but U.S. officials were for some years concerned that 

the Soviets might have been engaged in activities contrary 

to its object and purpose.) Subsequent cooperative 

verification work with the USSR, however- in the form of 

the Joint Verification Experiments (JVE) beginning in 1987 

- put this concern to rest, demonstrating that the Soviets 

had not been cheating. 

The 1990 Report found the Soviet Union to be 

violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty (L TBT) of 1963 for 

failing to prevent the venting of radioactive materials into 

the atmosphere from nuclear weapons tests. Indeed, in the 

1991 Report, the United States declared that ever since 

the LTBT came into force, "the Soviet Union has conducted 

its nuclear weapons test program in a manner incompatible 

with the terms of the Treaty." 

Nuclear testing issues thereafter disappeared from 

unclassified Compliance Reports for several years, but they 

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Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

reappeared in the 2010 Report, which concluded that 

"there were no indications during the reporting period that 

any [NPT nuclear weapon state] engaged in activities 

inconsistent with its declared moratorium." The 2014, 

2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Reports also briefly 

mentioned the nuclear testing moratoria, albeit without 

saying anything about any country's adherence to them, 

one way or the other. (The 2017 and 2018 Reports, 

however, did remark that "[a]dditional country information 

is provided in higher classification reporting."7) 

In discussing the time period of 1995-2018, the 2019 

Report offered much more information about nuclear 

testing, now declaring -following and amplifying public 

comments that had at that point already been made by the 

head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency-that Russia 

had probably not adhered to the "zero-yield" nuclear 

testing moratorium that the United States, the United 

Kingdom, and France had adopted. "The United States, 

including the Intelligence Community, has assessed that 

Russia has conducted nuclear weapons tests that have 

created nuclear yield." 

The 2019 Report also raised a specific concern with the 

TTBT -though not about exceeding that Treaty's 150 

kiloton yield limit but rather about Moscow's possible 

failure to notify the United States of planned testing that 

would result in nuclear explosive energy breaching the 

containment vessel. 

Building upon this conclusion about Russian yieldproducing nuclear tests, the Executive Summary of the 

2020 Report declares that: 

"The United States assesses that Russia has conducted 

nuclear weapons-related experiments that have 

created nuclear yield. Russia may be testing in a 

manner that releases nuclear energy from an explosive 

canister. This possibility raises compliance concerns 

with Russia's TTBT obligation to notify . ... Based on 

available information, Russian activities during the 

1995-2019 timeframe raise concerns about Russia's 

compliance with its TTBT notification obligation." 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

Moreover, as for whether Russia had adhered to a "zeroyield" interpretation of its own moratorium on nuclear 

weapons-related testing, 

"[t]he United States finds that Russia has conducted 

nuclear weapons experiments that have created 

nuclear yield and are not consistent with the U.S. 'zeroyield' standard. The United States does not know how 

many, if any, supercritical or self-sustaining nuclear 

experiments Russia conducted in 2019. Despite Russia 

renewing its nuclear testing moratorium in 1996, some 

of its activities since 1996 have demonstrated a failure 

to adhere to the U.S. 'zero-yield' standard, which 

would prohibit supercritical tests." 

(Both the 2019 and 2020 Reports also raised concerns 

about the PRC in this regard.) 

The return of such nuclear testing issues to the 

unclassified Compliance Reports marks another step in the 

Reports' chronicle of problematic Russian behavior. 

Ill. Conclusion 

The corpus of U.S. compliance reporting offers a useful 

window into two generations of Washington's arms control 

concerns with Moscow, the geopolitical environment in 

which these dynamics were embedded, and the troubling 

overall trajectory of Russian behavior upon the Kremlin's 

turn away from the cooperative optimism of the 1990s and 

early 2000s to a more Cold War-style indifference to arms 

control obligations and commitments as the U.5.-Russian 

relationship worsened. It is important to understand this 

track record of Russian compliance - and of 

noncompliance -with arms control obligations as we craft 

approaches to future arms control. 

In particular, it is worth emphasizing what a contrast 

Russia's course of widespread noncompliance with such 

obligations is with what was hoped and expected in the 

post-Cold War era. The last years of the Cold War and the 

first years of its aftermath were a notably productive time 

for arms control and disarmament agreements, as leaders 

took advantage of the eased tensions and strengthened 

trust of that period to sign a number of important 

instruments capitalizing upon the confidence and goodwill 

7 It is often the case, as the 1985 Report pointed out long ago, that the U.S. Government knows of compliance or adherence issues that it 

cannot discuss publicly: "Beyond the issues that are treated in the unclassified report released today, there are other compliance issues that 

will not be publicly disclosed at this time but which remain under review." 

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Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

of the time, seeking to institutionalize it, and attempting to 

build foundations for further progress in peacemaking, risk 

reduction, and disarmament. 

This was certainly the case in U.S. relations with the 

Soviet Union and then Russia, where the pathbreaking INF 

Treaty-which was signed in 1987 and took effect in 1988 

- eliminated, for the first time, an entire class of nuclearcapable delivery systems. In 1991, INF was followed by 

START, which brought about significant cuts in strategic 

nuclear forces between the two former Cold War 

antagonists. During this period, Washington and Moscow 

also made reciprocal political commitments in the form of 

the PNls, promising, inter alia, not to deploy and to 

eliminate great numbers of their respective ground-based 

non-strategic nuclear weapons. 

Previous nuclear arms control agreements between 

Washington and Moscow during the tension-filled 

competitive periods of the Cold War had merely limited 

what weapons would be permitted to each side, but in the 

newly cooperative spirit of the period in which Cold War 

antagonism dissolved, it proved possible to bring about 

major reductions. In this new environment, it was also 

possible to revolutionize the verification and transparency 

measures each side was willing to accept. Whereas 

strategic arms control in more competitive eras, such as 

SALT, had relied upon "national technical means" of 

verification (i.e., intelligence collection), INF and START 

took advantage of the cooperative security environment of 

their period to construct for the first time elaborate 

verification architectures involving various forms of 

routinized on-site monitoring and inspection visits. 

Beyond the bilateral arena, multilateral conventional 

arms control saw considerable progress in the cooperative 

post-Cold War years in as well. Negotiated during the final 

years of the Cold War, for instance, the CFE Treaty was 

signed in 1990 in an attempt to prevent any future Cold 

War-style buildup of forces that could lead to fears - or 

even the reality- of a blitzkrieg-type attack across 

Europe's prior lines of geopolitical division. 

The Treaty on Open Skies had been an idea proposed 

by the United States in the 1950s, but such confidencebuilding provisions were unacceptable to Moscow during 

the Cold War-when unqualified transparency seemed 

threatening to Soviet totalitarianism, and when the 

Kremlin wished the West to see as little as possible within 

its borders. With the end of the Cold War, however, the 

previously unacceptable became possible, and Open Skies 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

was signed in 1992: an important confidence-promotion 

step that, it was hoped, would help lock in the 

strengthened trust of that period for the indefinite future. 

These hopes, however, have unfortunately not been 

realized. Thanks to Russian violations and efforts to 

manipulate that instrument in support of Vladimir Putin's 

strategy of regional threat and intimidation, the Open 

Skies Treaty has failed to provide the benefits once 

envisioned, providing neither an enhanced sense of 

security nor confidence. 

Similarly, the Helsinki Final Act principles expressed in 

1975 had been a source of contention between East and 

West during the last decade of the Cold War, when Soviet 

leaders -who had been happy enough to embrace 

Helsinki's support for Europe's post-1945 territorial 

boundaries - bridled at efforts to vindicate Helsinki 

principles as they applied to respect for human rights, 

freedom to travel, and the free flow of information across 

borders. With the waning of Cold War tensions, it became 

possible to do much more to institutionalize Helsinkiinspired confidence- and security-building measures. This 

was first explored at Stockholm in 1986, and then in several 

iterations of the Vienna Document beginning in 1990, 

which inaugurated a number of transparency and openness 

practices between all the Organization for Security and 

Cooperation in Europe participating States. 

The initial period of post-Cold War cooperation also 

saw the emergence of the Chemical Weapons Convention 

-which had been under negotiation since 1980, but which 

it finally became possible to bring to conclusion and open 

for signature in 1993. The countries of the world also 

attempted to ban nuclear weapons test explosions with the 

CTBT, which was opened for signature in 1996. 

Looking back at the progress that was made in 

bringing Moscow into new arms control and disarmament 

frameworks during the early post-Cold War period helps 

highlight the egregiousness of Russia's more scofflaw 

approach in recent years. As the Kremlin has increasingly 

acted out as a destabilizingly revisionist grievance state 

determined to seize a new role and sphere of influence for 

itself at the expense of its neighbors, Moscow has come to 

ignore - or simply treat as optional - some of the very 

agreements and commitments that once signaled its long 

hoped-for arrival as a cooperative and valued partner in the 

community of nations. This unhappy trend can clearly be 

seen across the corpus of U.S. Compliance Reports since 

the mid-20oos, which detail retrograde Russian motion on 

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Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Russian Arms Control Compliance: A Report Card, 1984-2020 

multiple fronts, including INF, CFE, Vienna Document, 

ewe, Open Skies, PNls, and nuclear testing. 

This is, therefore, crucial background for 

understanding the challenges that face us today in 

negotiating meaningful arms limits and ensuring that 

compliance with them can be effectively verified. Despite 

such a long record of problematic behavior by the Russian 

government, the United States believes in the stability and 

predictability that can be provided by arms control, and so 

remains firmly committed to pursuing "next-generation 

arms control" (i.e., a trilateral agreement with both Russia 

and China). 

The challenges of creating such a new framework are 

formidable, beginning with the difficulty of getting the PRC 

to engage constructively with the United States in any kind 

of arms control talks at all. The PRC has an obligation 

under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to 

pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures 

relating to avoiding an arms race and achieving disarmament. 

Chinese behavior, however, is problematic. Even while it 

rapidly expands its own nuclear arsenal, for instance, 

Beijing has yet to even respond to our December 2019 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume I, Number 10 I June 18, 2020 

invitation to begin a Strategic Security Dialogue analogous 

to the discussions we continue to hold with Russia. 

With regard to Russia, however-the focus of this 

paper-the problem is different, for Moscow professes 

itself willing to negotiate and indeed began talking 

tentatively with us about future arms control concepts in 

our Strategic Security Dialogue in January 2020. 

Unfortunately, however, it is also clear from the history 

recounted in U.S. Compliance Reports over the last 35 

years that the Kremlin has been willing to treat many of its 

arms control obligations and commitments as mere 

options, especially when it perceives itself to be in an 

adversarial relationship with the United States and sees 

potential advantage in cheating. 

This clearly presents special challenges when it comes 

to ensuring effective verification and robust compliance 

enforcement. Meeting these challenges will require us to 

be creative, thoughtful, firm, disciplined, and decisive -

and to remember the history of what has come before. 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis.