U.S. says Russia violated treaty in missile test The United States informed its NATO allies this month that Russia had tested a new ground-launched cruise missile, raising concerns about Moscow's compliance with a landmark arms control accord. U.S. officials believe that Russia began conducting flight tests of the missile as early as 2008. Such tests are prohibited by the treaty banning medium-range missiles that was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time, and that has long been viewed as one of the bedrock accords that brought an end to the Cold War. Beginning in May, Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department's senior arms control official, has repeatedly raised the missile tests with Russian officials, who have responded that they investigated the matter and consider the case to be closed. But Obama administration officials are not yet ready to formally declare the tests of the missile, which has not been deployed, to be a violation of the 1987 treaty. With President Barack Obama pledging to seek deeper cuts in nuclear arms, the State Department has been trying to find a way to resolve the compliance issue, preserve the treaty and keep the door open to future arms control accords. "The United States never hesitates to raise treaty compliance concerns with Russia, and this issue is no exception," said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman. Other officials, who asked not to be identified because they were discussing internal deliberations, said that there was no question that the missile tests ran counter to the treaty and that the administration had already shown considerable patience with the Russians. And some members of Congress, who have been briefed on the tests on a classified basis for more than a year, have been pressing the White House for a firmer response. Since Obama has been in office, the Russians have insisted that they want to keep the agreement. But in the view of U.S. analysts, Russia has also mounted a determined effort to build up its nuclear abilities to compensate for the weakness of its conventional, nonnuclear forces. And even with the best of intentions, establishing what the Russians are doing might not be easy; the elaborate network of verification provisions that were created under the medium-range missile treaty is no longer in effect, since all the systems that were believed to be covered by the agreement were long thought to have been destroyed.