"The main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No," a foreign ministry source told RIA Novosti state news agency.

The official said that Russia has "many times publicly denounced the US policy course towards dismantling the nuclear deal."

Washington "has approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step by step destroying the basis for the agreeement," the official said, quoted by Russia's three main news agencies.

"This decision is part of the US policy course to withdraw from those international legal agreements that place equal responsibilities on it and its partners and make vulnerable its concept of its own 'exceptionalism'," the official said.

Russian senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was "the second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world" with the first being Washington's 2001 withdrawal from the Anti- Ballistic Missile treaty."

"And again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the US," Pushkov wrote.