This was done to look like the Americans, to play the superpower status, it says: take us seriously.

Igor Sutyagin

Igor Vyacheslavovich Sutyagin is a Russian arms control and nuclear weapons specialist. In 1998 he became the head of the subdivision for Military-Technical and Military-Economic Policy at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he worked before he was arrested for treason, although he had no access to classified documentation as a civilian researcher. He spent 11 years in prison on espionage charges and was released by Russia in exchange for the release of a group of spies arrested in the United States. As of 2014, Igor Sutyagin is a Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London.

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