Moscow will pause participation in a 2011 nuclear arms control treaty with the U.S., the only agreement between two great powers limiting nuclear weapons arsenals, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday after President Joe Biden paid a historic visit to Kyiv.

The U.S. in January had accused Russia of failing to abide by a 2011 treaty known as New START, which places mutually agreed-upon caps on the varieties and amounts of nuclear warheads and delivery weapons each country can maintain. Russia was blocking U.S. teams that, as part of the treaty provisions, are allowed to conduct regular inspections of each other’s weapons sites and is the only treaty that limits the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, according to CNN.

“They want to deal us a strategic defeat and are meddling with our nuclear facilities. In this context, I have to declare today that Russia is suspending its participation in the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Arms,” Putin told a government assembly in a state of the nation speech Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

[Don’t kid yourselves into thinking that Biden’s visit to Kyiv had anything to do with this. Putin was going to abandon New Start no matter what in his ambition to rebuild the Soviet empire without too much of the Soviet-ness getting in the way of his oligarchs. Even if Ukraine had been a walkover, this was an inevitability. Putin likely plans to renegotiate these pacts from a position of strength against the West, but unfortunately he’s never going to get there, especially after bleeding Russia dry in his genocidal war in Ukraine. — Ed]