A unilateral US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty could provoke a “cold war,” President Vladimir Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday, June 19. Putin's speech is broadcast on the SPIEF website.

“It is not local conflicts, but global decisions that lead to the Cold War. For example, such as the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,” Putin said. According to him, this step changes the global security system and “pushes us all towards a new round of armaments.”

“As for regional conflicts, no matter where they occur, for some reason the warring parties always find weapons somewhere, and this is also true for the eastern regions of Ukraine,” Putin noted.

Earlier, discussing the causes of the conflict in Donbass, Putin said that Russia is not the root cause of the crisis phenomena observed in Ukraine. “I am deeply convinced that after the so-called bipolar system ceased to exist, after the Soviet Union disappeared from the political map, some of our partners in the West, primarily the United States, found themselves in a state of some kind of euphoria. And instead of building good neighborly and partnership relations, they began to explore new, free, as it seemed to them, geopolitical spaces,” Putin said.

Apparently, one of Russia’s partners had the illusion that after World War II a vacuum had appeared and it needed to be filled quickly, he said, emphasizing that this was a wrong approach.

Putin warned the US against unleashing a “cold war”