Congressional leaders are acting to force the Obama administration to confront Russia on its violations of a nuclear treaty that U.S. officials have acknowledged since 2012.

On November 27 of that year, two top Obama administration officials held a closed-door hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, who only months later would become President Obamaâs secretary of state. Inside the top-secret hearing, acting Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs Madelyn Creedon told lawmakers that Russia had violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), according to two U.S. officials who attended the classified meeting.
Inside the meeting, Kerry expressed anger and frustration about the Russian cheating and warned that if the violations became widely known, future efforts to convince the Senate to ratify arms control treaties would be harmed.
âIf weâre going to have treaties with people, weâve got to adhere to them,â Kerry said, according to two U.S. officials who read the classified transcript of the hearing. âWeâre not going to pass another treaty in the U.S. Senate if our colleagues are sitting up here knowing somebody is cheating.â
Kerry was a major proponent of the New START treaty with Russia, which the Senate ratified after a long debate in December 2010. As secretary of state, he has supported negotiating a follow-on treaty with Russia that could place further limits on the two countriesâ stockpiles of strategic and tactical deployed nuclear weapons.
But Kerry knew last year that Russia was in violation of the INF Treaty. That pact, signed by President Reagan, bars development, testing, or deployment of missiles or delivery systems with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
âIf weâre going to try to reduce more weapons or weâre going to try to have further limitsâŚI canât look you in the eye, I canât look anybody in the eye here and say, âHey, vote for this, we havenât followed through and kept the promises with the prior ones, with the foundations that weâve built here,â Kerry said inside the hearing.
The exact manner of the Russian cheating remains unclear and highly classified, although there have been several reports that Russia has tested and plans to continue testing two missiles in ways that could violate the terms of the treaty: the SS-25 road mobile intercontinental ballistic missile and the newer RS-26 ICBM, which Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has called âthe missile defense killer,â a reference to U.S. plans to expand ballistic missile defense in Europe.
The State Department declined to confirm or deny that it believes Russia is in violation of the treaty and declined to comment on the 2012 briefing with Kerry.
âThe administrationâs been candid with Congress about a range of countries where we have ongoing treaty compliance issues and are seeking to address them, and that includes concerns we have raised with Russia,â an administration official said. âDeterminations about non-compliance are made after a careful process, but Congress is in the loop.â
Some experts say the Obama administrationâs failure to acknowledge the treaty violations publicly or confront the Russians about them openly indicates the administration canât be trusted to take on potential violations by other bad actors with whom it has struck deals, such as the Iranian government and Bashar al-Assadâs regime in Syria.
âIf itâs true that the Obama administration has not been candid aboutâor worse, actively suppressedâinformation that Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, then how are congressional lawmakers and the American public supposed to trust that the administration wonât do the same if the Assad regime violates the agreement to remove chemical weapons from Syria or if Iran cheats on the Geneva pact on its nuclear program?â said former congressional staffer Robert Zarate, now policy director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.
Other congressional aides said the Obama administration has briefed certain European allies about the Russian treaty violations but has not informed the entire North Atlantic Council, the political branch of the 27-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
âThe INF Treaty is the backbone of protecting Europe from nuclear threats,â said a senior GOP Senate aide. âThe fact that the administration will not brief NATO on this issue is a clear indication they place a higher priority on their relationship with Russia than with actual allies in Europe.â
Not all experts agree that the violations are of grave importance. Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, said treaty violations can be dealt with on a bilateral basis.
âThere are real concerns about developments in Russian nuclear strategy,â he said. âBut issues of compliance by both nations with arms control treaties are common, and we have reliable methods for resolving these issues. We have to make sure that a compliance problem is not used as an excuse to blow up a threat reduction mechanism that provides real security benefits for the United States.â
But 10 Republican senators disagree and have proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), obtained by The Daily Beast, that would force the administration to send Congress âa report on information and intelligence sharing with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and NATO countries on compliance issues related to the INF Treaty.â
The lead senator on the amendment, Sen. James Risch (R-ID), has been furious about the administrationâs handling of Russiaâs INF Treaty violations for several months.
Risch confronted Kerry about the cheating at Kerryâs January confirmation hearing, although the senator didnât say exactly what he was talking about due to the classified nature of the information.
âYou and I have sat through some classified briefings, and I donât want to get into details that we shouldnât get into, but Iâd like your thoughts on where we are at the present time regarding compliance and verification in a general fashion,â Risch said.
Risch also wanted Kerry to promise that any future arms reduction treaties would be sent to the Senate for ratification, considering the past violations, rather than being simply agreed to by the two governments.
âI donât want to be commenting in some prophylactic way one side or the other without the specific situation in front of me. But Iâm confident the president is committed to upholding the Constitution,â Kerry responded, defending the administrationâs right to sign agreements without congressional consent.
Risch is one of multiple senators holding up Gottemoellerâs confirmation as undersecretary of state, which has been stalled for months. Sources also said Gottemoeller is being considered to replace Michael McFaul next year as U.S. ambassador to Russia.
Concerns about Russiaâs violations of the INF Treaty have been expressed repeatedly by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and leading House members, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers.
âSince October, we have written to you twice with our concerns about a massive Russian violation and circumvention of an arms control obligation to the United States of great significance to this nation and to its NATO allies,â McKeon and Rogers wrote in an April letter to Obama. âBriefings provided by your administration have agreed with your assessment that Russian actions are serious and troubling, but have failed to offer any assurance of any concrete action to address these Russian actions.â
Russian officials have denied they are violating the INF Treaty but at the same time have signaled that at some point the country intends to withdraw from the treaty and pursue development of the currently banned weapons.
Sergei Ivanov, head of the office of President Vladimir Putin, told a Russian TV channel in June that Russia was looking for a way out of the agreement.
âWhy is it that everyone and anyone can have this class of weapons and we and the United States cannot?â Ivanov said. âThe question arises. On the one hand, we signed the Soviet-American agreement. We perform, but it cannot go on for infinity.â