Russia exceeds limits placed on warheads by START treaty

Foxtrot Alpha:

Russia has deployed 215 more nuclear warheads than allowed by the New START treaty, setting itself up to violate a provision that goes into effect next year. Surely this will end well.

New START allows 1,500 deployed warheads, with that goal supposed to be reached in February 2018, and it’s designed to help both the U.S. and Russia know what each country has as far as its stockpiles. It also allows verification to ensure both nations are honoring their obligations, with on-site inspections and data exchanges are required. The regime is extremely intrusive and, arguably, has helped avoid another Cold War, if you consider how unstable relations would be if neither Washington nor Moscow knew what the other country had.

And right now, the two parties are supposed to be working to reduce their number of deployed warheads, not actively increasing them. But it looks like Russia is doing the latter.
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If Putin devoted more of Russia's resources to growing its economy than trying to relitigate the cold war, he and the Russians would be better off.  The US does not want to conquer Russia and wouldn't be interested in running it if it were forced to do so.  But the US does act as a restraint on Russian expansion and that does appear to grate at Putin with his nostalgia for the Soviet Union.