Special report: Trump's hopes of nuclear deal with Putin come down to the wire

• "The arms control architecture would practically cease to exist," EU arms control envoy Marjolijn van Deelen said Thursday on a conference call with reporters.
• Both sides have warned that without a deal, they're prepared for an arms race.

While Joe Biden has said he’d extend New START if elected, the Trump administration has insisted it will only extend the Obama-era deal if Russia addresses its priorities — limiting all nuclear warheads and bringing China to the table.

• U.S. arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea has repeatedly said the offer will expire on Election Day. After that, “our asking price will go up.”
• Putin came in with an offer this week that was well below that asking price but closed enough of the gap that Billingslea pronounced a deal "very, very close."

Driving the news: Just days earlier, the White House had rejected a proposal from Putin — a one-year extension to allow for further negotiations — as a “non-starter.” But on Tuesday, Russia added a surprise twist.

• It was now prepared to "undertake a political commitment to ‘freeze’ ... the number of nuclear warheads that each side possesses" for a year, as long as the U.S. dropped all "additional demands."
• State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus quickly said the U.S. was "prepared to meet immediately to finalize a verifiable agreement," which a senior U.S. official told the WSJ could be reached within days.

Between the lines: That’s where things get complicated. Russia hadn’t said anything about the agreement being verifiable.

• In fact, Billingslea's Russian counterpart, Sergei Ryabkov, Thursday seemed to suggest it wouldn't be.
• Russia had simply agreed to "the concept of a nuclear warhead freeze — without additional appendages and requirements for Russia," he told Russia's Kommersant newspaper.
• Between the lines: "Russia, as a closed society, has always treated verification as a concession," notes Pranay Vaddi of the Carnegie Endowment.

The two sides also don't have a shared definition of what exactly would be frozen.

• While New START limits the number of deployed warheads with which the U.S. and Russia could strike one another, it doesn't cap shorter-range systems or non-deployed warheads.
• A full accounting of all warheads has never been attempted.

Where things stand: Billingslea told "PBS Newshour" on Tuesday that any deal would "of course" have to include "effective verification." But he acknowledged that no agreement to that effect had been reached.

• That leaves quite a bit of ground to cover in less than two weeks.

The view from Russia: Hedging its bets

A deal only appears possible now because of the sudden "U-turn" from Putin, notes Elena Chernenko, who covers arms control for Kommersant.

The backstory: Russia has long called for an unconditional extension of New START and insisted that any further negotiations also put Russian priorities like missile defense on the table.

• Now the position has been changed — and not by negotiators in the Foreign Ministry, she reports. "This decision was taken in the Kremlin."
• It's the second significant concession from Moscow, after the agreement that New START be extended for only one year, rather than five.

What to watch: "Experts here in Russia were clearly surprised by this change of the position, because they see several possible traps for Russia in such a possible freeze," Chernenko said on a call hosted by the European Leadership Network (ELN).

• Any alleged violations of the freeze could be treated as grounds for U.S. sanctions, she says.
• Second, a potential Biden administration could insist that the freeze be the starting point for further negotiations, rather than a clean extension of New START.

Russia is "hedging its bets," says Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

• This deal would remove the risk of New START's imminent expiration and allow arms control talks with a possible Biden administration to start "from the very beginning," rather than with a scramble to extend the deal, she says.

The latest: Putin may also be hedging on his own commitments.

• According to Bloomberg, he said Thursday at the Valdai Forum in Moscow that New START should be extended "for a year, without preconditions" to allow for further negotiations.
• That sounds a lot like the position the U.S. already rejected.

What's next: Three scenarios

James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, tells Axios there are three scenarios for how this could play out over the next two weeks:

1. No deal (for now).
2. An agreement with no verification. Acton calls that the "Singapore scenario," referring to Trump's 2018 summit with Kim Jong-un. That's possible if Trump "just wants a deal and doesn't care about the details."
3. An agreement with a "vague statement" on verification. The U.S. could spin that as a win, but it "won't actually commit the Russians to anything," he says.

Breaking it down: Any deal that can be reached by Nov. 3 will require "a pretty drastic fallback in the U.S. position," Vaddi says.

• The U.S. has consistently demanded very strict verification for any deal, and just two months ago was insisting that China take part in any nuclear negotiations.
• "There's been some shift in Trump's and Putin's views that gets them a little bit closer to an agreement," Vaddi says.

By offering proposals directly, Putin has now taken a more public role in this process than Trump.

• "The single most important factor is how much Trump personally wants this," Acton says.
• "If he's not engaged, no deal is by far the most likely option. If he does care — if he is engaged and he wants something — I think it's highly likely you end up with something."

The "no deal" scenario

While Billingslea has pushed for a deal before the election, he hasn't ruled out an agreement that would come together between Election Day and Feb. 5.

Yes, but: The administration has ruled out a clean extension of New START.

• "The New START treaty constrains 92% of the entire U.S. arsenal. ... It only covers 45% or less of the Russian arsenal," Billingslea contended in the PBS interview, referring to Russia's vast stockpile of smaller-range "tactical" nuclear weapons, which aren't covered in the treaty.
• "And of course, New START covers not a single Chinese warhead."

Billingslea denied that Biden's intention to extend New START reduced the Trump administration's leverage.

• In fact, he claimed that Russia's willingness to countenance a warhead cap would actually force Biden to adopt Trump's strategy, at least in part.
• "That now sets the floor for future arms control discussions, so the Biden administration would have to rethink their whole approach."

What to watch: While a Biden administration won't see things that way, Acton says, a one-year extension could give Biden a window of opportunity to test the waters for a future treaty.

• It would be a delicate balancing act.
• As former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns told Axios in a recent interview, Biden may have to confront Russia over election interference and other aggressive behavior while simultaneously negotiating the future of arms control.

Flashback: When New START was finalized in 2010, Mukhatzhanova notes, it was intended as a "placeholder" while the U.S. and Russia negotiated the next big arms control treaty.

• 10 years later, relations have deteriorated to the point where the burning question is whether New START itself will survive.