Russia and China condemn US over Golden Dome missile shield plans

Russia and China issued a blistering joint statement on Wednesday, targeting U.S. President Donald Trump’s "Golden Dome" missile defense initiative. The nuclear superpowers warned that Washington's current trajectory severely threatens global strategic stability.

The high-level rebuke was delivered from Beijing, where President Xi Jinping welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin with a full guard of honor and a gun salute at the Great Hall of the People, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.

The two nations explicitly called out the U.S. for an "irresponsible policy" that allowed the critical 2010 New START arms control treaty to expire earlier this year without negotiating a valid replacement.

First announced by President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the "Golden Dome" project is a highly ambitious defense architecture designed to intercept, track, and destroy incoming threats before or during flight. Russia and China argue that its ultimate scale inherently upsets the balance of global power:

Multi-Sphere Defenses: The system scales up ground-based interceptors, command centers, and sensors.

Orbital Warfare: It incorporates space-based satellite networks and weapons designed to target threats directly from orbit.

Preemptive Focus: The joint statement claims the architecture is built to disable "peer adversaries'" capabilities entirely, running contrary to the core concept of mutual strategic deterrence.

According to the Kremlin and Beijing, trying to separate offensive capabilities from defensive ones completely undermines decades of international arms agreements.

The diplomatic friction comes at an incredibly tense moment in global security. U.S. lawmakers have long criticized caps like the New START treaty, arguing that Washington must untie its hands to adequately counter China’s rapid, unchecked nuclear buildup. In response, Russia publicly backed China's choice to opt out of any three-way U.S.-Russian-Chinese nuclear limitation talks.

The two leaders also condemned unnamed nuclear powers for drawing up plans to forward-deploy shorter-range missiles, calling them highly destabilizing attempts to "decapitate and disarm" adversaries.

As if to reinforce the gravity of the joint statement, Russia simultaneously broadcasted high-profile military footage on Wednesday. The videos showed coordinated tactical teams transporting and loading nuclear warheads onto mobile Iskander-M missile systems as part of massive, ongoing combat exercises spanning across Russia and Belarus.

News.Az 

By Aysel Mammadzada