The missiles return: As Russia ends moratorium, is this return of Cold War 2.0?

As the conflicts around the globe spread and escalate, Russia has decided to lift its self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of medium- and long-range ground-launched missiles, marking it as a new era of new cold war volatility. This move is not just a regional message; it is a response to the US provocation.

It can be summed up as an inflexion point in the international order, a security flare in a world that is already seemingly overfilled with rivalries, proxy wars and weaponised diplomacy. It is not about moving into Cold War 2.0. We are sprinting into something more volatile, more layered, and dangerously underwritten by emerging technology and vanishing trust.

This announcement effectively declares the death of one of the last remnants of the Cold War’s strategic arms control framework. With the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty long gone and the New Start agreement set to expire within months, what was once a guarded stalemate between superpowers is now an open-ended competition, where restraint is replaced by readiness and silence by sharp escalation.

A Funeral for INF and Restraint

The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, was not simply an agreement between Washington and Moscow. It was a symbol of what diplomacy could achieve even at the height of mistrust. For decades, it held a particular class of missiles in check. There was no time to react to these weapons – they were too high-speed and too lethal to react sensibly. Their elimination stabilised Europe, calmed publics and provided breathing space to both Nato and the Warsaw Pact.

However, that legacy is now coming apart after the United States came out of the treaty in 2019, citing it had been repeatedly violated by Russia. Russia rejected it, stating that it was a ploy by the US to escalate its missile development programme. Despite the official termination of the treaty by the US, Russia continued a unilateral moratorium, apparently as a diplomatic gesture.

That restraint is now over. Russia has declared that conditions no longer justify self-limitation. The rationale offered points to deployments of American intermediate-range systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. But the implications run deeper. This is not about matching threats. It is about regaining leverage. It is about writing new rules for a security environment that no longer respects legacy arrangements.

The Geography of Fear

The strategic geography of Europe is again under transformation. Ranges of 1,000 to 5,500 kilometres will allow missiles to be based in Belarus or in the western regions of Russia and, within a couple of minutes, reach all of Central Europe, much of the UK, and significant parts of Southern Europe. Policymakers in Brussels, Berlin and Paris would have only seconds to judge an incoming launch and react. These are not imaginary hypotheses but operational realities.

Modern missile systems are not like the ones decommissioned under INF. They are faster, stealthier, and capable of precision targeting. Russia’s Oreshnik missile, reportedly entering serial production, is a hypersonic platform capable of flying at over Mach 10 and carrying either conventional or nuclear warheads. It is more than a weapon. It is a message. It tells the West that Russia’s strategic patience has expired and that its deterrence posture will now match rhetoric with deployment.

In Europe, the age of hunkering down under ambiguous pledges and the hypothetical nuclear doctrinaire is soon ending. These missiles will cause a lot of debate as they will re-emerge; the demands of missile defence will again erupt and could possibly enhance a new gap between the United States and its European allies. The beneficiary of the arms industry bigwigs from the US. The governments could even host systems that they cannot control, bringing them into close vicinity of the front line of a dispute they hardly control.

A Fractured Deterrence Landscape

The implications stretch beyond Nato. The Asia-Pacific, with already turbulence in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, may now experience the same deployment by the United States and its allies, which will result in a response by the Chinese and Russians. The logic of deterrence is again becoming regional, volatile, and increasingly unstable.

Missiles once banned for their destabilising characteristics are now being celebrated for their supposed deterrent value. This inversion of logic reflects a broader breakdown in the global security consensus. Deterrence has changed with technology and the weaponisation of all instruments of power. It is no longer shaped by treaties or sanctions. It is shaped by self-interests, domestic politics, and strategic ambiguity.

But ambiguity works both ways. It invites miscalculation, encourages brinkmanship, and reduces decision time. In a world where hypersonic systems can reach targets in minutes and where communication lines are increasingly frail, the risk is not just escalation. The risk is unintentional war.

The Vanishing Safety Net

Arms control was never about eliminating weapons. It was about reducing the risk that weapons would be used by mistake. Treaties created transparency, limited suspicion, and opened lines of dialogue. Their absence now creates exactly the opposite.

With New Start nearing expiry and no negotiations in sight, we are entering uncharted territory. The last major arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear powers will soon disappear. The verification mechanisms, data sharing, and mutual inspections it provided will vanish with it. What comes next is not just an arms race. It is a race without rules.

Even in the depths of the Cold War, there were rules. There were hotlines. There were backchannels. Most of that architecture is dismantled or at least ignored today. The planet is widely over-polarised, weaponised and technologically displaced to engage in diplomacy that does not give visible, immediate benefits.

That void has consequences. As states pursue new missile technologies, autonomous delivery systems, and dual-use platforms, the threshold for use narrows. Political leaders will face choices under pressure, with incomplete information, and very little time.

Strategic Calm or Strategic Collapse

There remains a narrow window for reengagement. The absence of treaties does not mean the absence of diplomacy. But diplomacy must now be pursued under far more difficult conditions. Trust is scarce. Political incentives are misaligned. Domestic constituencies in many countries have become more nationalistic, less trusting of international commitments, and more drawn to rhetoric than restraint.

The choice facing the major powers is clear. Meditations are an old part of architecture that is dismantled or forgotten today. The world is now too busy, too polarised, and technologically divorced to buy into the diplomacy that does not deliver instant outcomes. The choice can only be that of either returning to the table and designing a new arms control architecture, befitting the technologies of our time, or walking in the path of competitive deployments, provocative signalling, and blind escalation.

The second direction is a world of a constant state of crisis, where each exercise of the military is interpreted as preparations for war and where logic fails to test deterrence but instead instils fear.

Conclusion: The Age of Illusions Is Over

The scrapping of Russia’s missile moratorium is a mirror to the world. It reflects a broader breakdown in international security governance. It tells us that deterrence is being recalibrated not through dialogue, but through deployment.

This is not a Cold War, which did connote restraint, symmetry, and discipline. This is more chaotic, unpredictable, and penetrated by new technologies that do not respond to a traditional control regime and ignite a miscalculation in milliseconds.

Until the global community invests in diplomacy and in norms and new templates of strategic stability, the coming years could be characterised not by peace through power but by crisis through volatile rivalry. The missiles are reappearing. What remains is the world that will have to choose what future it wants to live in and what kind of future they are prepared to risk.

The author is former Director General, Mechanised Forces. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.