Thanks to the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, a disarmament treaty has denied Vladimir Putin thousands more missiles which he could have ordered to be used against Ukraine. Russian forces attacking Ukraine have not been able to use land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km because this entire category of weapons was scrapped under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the former Soviet leader was instrumental in establishing.
When the treaty was implemented, thousands of the Soviet Union’s most modern missiles were, along with their American equivalents, crushed, sawn or blown up. While the treaty was cancelled in 2019 by the then US president, Donald Trump, only one Russian missile type now exists that has this range (in violation of the treaty). As this SSC-8 missile has a nuclear-only role, it has not, so far, been used in Ukraine.
A huge proportion of Russian munitions used in Ukraine are vintage Soviet systems. With conventionally armed Soviet-era INF missiles with ranges over 500km, Lviv and other centres in western Ukraine could have been devastated.
