MARCH 2024 - Russia and the Global Nuclear Order - Nicole Grajewski

As a result of a grand bargain between the US and the With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia Soviet Union, Moscow has been empowered by inherited not only its nuclear arsenal but also its the institutionalization of privileges throughout the position in the global nuclear order’s hierarchy various regimes that govern nuclear technology, as a key player in shaping the norms and policies veri. [...] has been characterized by periods of overlapping In response to the pervasive threats of unsecured cooperation and contention, at least partly because nuclear materials, the US launched the CTR program, Russia and the US have historically differed in their which facilitated US-Russia collaboration to secure interpretations of the various rules of the global and dismantle the dispersed nuclear arse. [...] Following the collapse of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s implicit and explicit the Soviet Union, Ukraine found itself in possession nuclear threats appear to have greatly undermined of a significant portion of the the principles of the global former Soviet Union’s nuclear nuclear order. [...] shift in foreign policy priorities, Russia continues to Subsequently, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine assert its role within the framework of the NPT while in 2022 and its occupation of the Zaporizhzhia simultaneously challenging the validity, applicability, and interpretations of several key facets of the 77 See Mariana Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nucle. [...] 81 The represents a blatant violation armed seizure of the plant and of the commitments enshrined the fighting that took place around it for months in the Budapest Memorandum, undermining afterward caused episodic losses of off-site power, the foundational tenets of nuclear security and which is critical to the safe operation of the plant.