Sanctions relief as leverage

Contact is far denser than at any point since 2022. US envoys have travelled repeatedly to Moscow, the two militaries have re-established high-level communication, foreign ministers speak by phone, and leader-level calls have become routine enough to include congratulatory exchanges. Moscow presents this as overdue recognition of parity while simultaneously accusing Washington of stalling and issuing ultimatums -- the two Kremlin registers run side by side. The most telling pattern here is where the coverage lives rather than what it says. Russian state media treat the bilateral relationship as a standing subject and produce continuous commentary on its condition; Western outlets cover the same meetings and calls almost entirely as Ukraine-war developments, with the relationship itself appearing only as context. The result is that Moscow generates a large body of explicit narrative about the relationship while the Western position on it has to be inferred from war reporting -- an asymmetry in framing, not in the underlying events, and one reason the Kremlin's account of the relationship travels more easily than any competing one.

New START expired on 4 February 2026, ending the last treaty limits on the two largest nuclear arsenals and with them the inspection and data-exchange regime. The UN called the lapse a grave moment and coverage widely anticipates an unconstrained arms race. Talks on a successor have not stopped -- proposals have been floated and reported as close to agreement more than once, and China has publicly urged the two to resume strategic-stability dialogue -- but nothing has been concluded. Moscow attributes the collapse to rejected proposals and to the Golden Dome missile-defence programme; Washington points to Russian systems built outside any treaty's scope.