by Bill Gertz
The Russian government told the United States more than eight years ago that it wanted to abandon the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a Senate hearing last week.
“The Russian defense minister as early as 2007 approached me about doing away with the INF Treaty,” Gates said in Senate Armed Services Committee testimony Wednesday.
Gates said he was told by the Russian defense minister that the irony of the INF Freaty is that “the United States and Russia are the only countries that cannot have intermediate range missiles.”
The Russian minister told Gates that if Moscow abandoned the treaty it would not point its new medium-range missiles west, but would “put them in the south and in the east, meaning Iran and China,” he stated.
