Security versus status: explaining Russia's interest in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty.

Russia's war against Ukraine has thrown US–Russian nuclear arms control into a deep crisis. Against this background, the questions of what drives Russia's interest in nuclear arms control with the United States and what influences Moscow's preferences regarding the institutional design of arms-control agreements deserve renewed scrutiny. This article argues that it is important to look beyond Russia's material pressures and security concerns to understand when and in which form it is willing to pursue bilateral nuclear arms control. In particular, political elites' notions of national identity and status aspirations are central to Russia's arms-control policy. The article develops this argument by testing two theoretical frameworks—defensive neorealism and social-identity theory—that help to conceptualize material motives on the one hand and status motives on the other. It empirically investigates the importance of these motives for Russia's arms-control policy by assessing two case studies: the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991–92 and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty of 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]