Putin suspends US nuclear treaty, vows to keep fighting in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday suspended Moscow's participation in a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Washington during a speech in which he accused the West of escalating the Ukraine conflict.

In his scathing state of the nation address to Russian lawmakers, Putin also vowed that Russia would keep fighting in Ukraine ahead of the first anniversary of the military campaign.

Accusing Western powers of wanting "to be done with us once and for all", he said Russia was "forced" to suspend the New START treaty but would not pull out of the agreement altogether.

The 2010 treaty is the last major US-Russia arms control pact still in force but it has frayed in recent years, with accusations from Washington that Moscow was not complying with it.

Putin was speaking a day after US President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv in which he promised additional arms deliveries for Ukraine, and ahead of a speech by Biden in Warsaw.

Referring to the conflict in Ukraine, Putin said: "step by step, we will carefully and systematically solve the aims that face us".

He said it was "impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield".

"The responsibility for fuelling the Ukrainian conflict, for its escalation, for the number of victims... lies completely with Western elites," Putin said.

A top US official described as an "absurdity" Putin's accusations that Russia had been threatened by the West as justification for sending troops into Ukraine.

"Nobody is attacking Russia. There's a kind of absurdity in the notion that Russia was under some form of military threat from Ukraine or anyone else," White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters in Warsaw.-AFP