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By Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Senior Kremlin officials on Tuesday said there was little chance of striking a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States soon because there was not enough trust and cautioned that a host of other countries would gain nuclear weapons.
The bleak assessment from Moscow comes amid the disintegration of the tangle of arms control treaties which sought to slow the arms race and reduce the risk of nuclear war, and the swift expansion of China's nuclear arsenal.
Asked about the prospects for a replacement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which runs out in February 2026, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was very difficult right now to imagine even starting such talks.
"At the moment, it is very difficult to imagine the beginning of such negotiations," Peskov, who also serves as a deputy chief of staff in the presidential administration, told reporters.
To discuss such complex strategic issues, Peskov said, there needed to be a certain level of mutual trust - and that trust had "yet" to be restored between Moscow and Washington but could be if Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump had the political will.
Russia and the United States are by far the world's biggest nuclear powers, with about 88% of all nuclear weapons, followed by China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Russia's war in Ukraine has triggered the worst confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis - which is considered to be the time when the two Cold War superpowers came closest to intentional nuclear war.
The United States in 2022 was so concerned about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia that it warned Putin over the consequences of using such weapons, according to Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that more countries would get nuclear weapons in the coming years, blaming the West for pushing the world towards the brink of World War Three by waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov and Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Andrew Osborn)
