Moscow’s
response to Trump’s plans to quit the INF treaty could be to
reinstall military bases in Cuba, the State Duma defense committee
head said. He also predicted “a new Cuban crisis” if the US and
Russia fail to come to terms.
The US
is planning to walk away from the crucial Cold War-era
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and Russia’s
response may well be in the spirit of those times – namely,
reactivating military facilities in Cuba. That is according to
Vladimir Shamanov, the head of the State Duma defense committee and a
former Airborne Troops commander.
Indeed,
the Cuban government has to allow the Russian military back, and this
is more about politics than defense issues, Shamanov speculated.
“Assessing
this scenario is underway, and [policy] proposals will come next,”
he told Russia’s Interfax News Agency without elaborating.
This
issue may be raised when Cuba’s new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel,
visits Russia in early November. Diaz-Canel, a fresh face of Cuba’s
Communist Party, is wary of foreign military presence, but “politics
is living matter,” Shamanov said. “Cuba has its own
interests and it was hurt by US sanctions,” he added.
Previously,
the retired Airborne General urged Moscow and Washington to come to
terms and get back to reconciliation. “If we don’t stop it now
and don’t talk, we actually may create conditions similar to those
[which led to the] Cuban crisis,” he was quoted as saying by
RIA Novosti.
The
Cuban Missile Crisis was a major confrontation that brought the
United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war in
early 1960s. During the standoff, Moscow stationed Soviet
nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba in response to the deployment of
similar-class American missiles in Turkey.
Throughout
the course of the Cold War, Russia operated a signals intelligence
facility in Lourdes, Cuba. Opened in 1967, it was said to be the
largest Soviet listening station abroad, with 3,000 personnel running
the facility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Lourdes
base was downscaled, but continued operating up until 2001, when it
stopped all operations.
Restoring
Russia’s military presence in Cuba would make a lot of sense,
Viktor Murakhovsky told RT. He said reactivating the Lourdes base
should not require substantial funding, but it would allow the
gathering of “interesting intelligence about Cuba’s neighbor.”
He noted, however: “The times when we deployed missiles in Cuba
will not come back.”
Konstantin
Sivkov, another military expert and a retired Navy officer,
disagreed, stating it is unlikely the Russian military will return to
the island. “[In the 1960s] we were forced to make this decision
[to deploy missiles to Cuba] because we didn’t have enough
intercontinental ballistic missiles. Now we have.”
US
President Donald Trump sent shockwaves earlier in October when he
promised to withdraw from the INF treaty, citing the evergreen
‘Russia violated agreements’ argument. Russia fired back, stating
the US itself had breached the milestone accord by deploying
ground-based missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.
Then-US
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed
the deal in 1987, and it went into effect the next year. This was the
first time in history the two superpowers agreed to dismantle the
entire class of ballistic missiles and conceded to mutual
inspections.
Gorbachev
himself recently attacked Trump, whose goal, he claimed, was to free
the US “from any obligations, any constraints, and not just
regarding nuclear missiles.”
The
first and only Soviet president said in an opinion piece for the New
York Times that a new arms race is on and urged Russia to take “a
firm but balanced stand.”
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