SRINAGAR, India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Kashmir on Friday, his first visit to the contested Himalayan region since a conflict with arch-rival Pakistan last month, and opened a strategic railway line.

Modi is launching a string of projects worth billions of dollars for the divided Muslim-majority territory, the center of bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day conflict last month, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10.

His office broadcast images of Modi at a viewing point for the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long (4,314-foot-long) steel and concrete span that connects two mountains with an arch 359 meters above the river below.

“In addition to being an extraordinary feat of architecture, the Chenab Rail Bridge will improve connectivity,” the Hindu nationalist leader said in a social media post ahead of his visit.

Modi strode across the bridge waving a giant Indian flag to formally declare it open for rail traffic soon after his arrival.

New Delhi calls the Chenab span the “world’s highest railway arch bridge.” While several road and pipeline bridges are higher, Guinness World Records confirmed that Chenab trumps the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe in China.

The new 272-kilometer Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway, with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges, has been constructed “aiming to transform regional mobility and driving socio-economic integration,” Modi’s office says.

The bridge will facilitate the movement of people and goods, as well as troops, that was previously possible only via treacherous mountain roads and by air.

The railway “ensures all weather connectivity” and will “boost spiritual tourism and create livelihood opportunities,” Modi said.

The railway line is expected to halve the travel time between the town of Katra in the Hindu-majority Jammu region and Srinagar, the main city in Muslim-majority Kashmir, to around three hours.

More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire during last month’s conflict.

The fighting was triggered by an April 22 attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi accused Pakistan of backing – a charge Islamabad denies.

Rebel groups in Indian-run Kashmir have waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan.

Russia sees little chance of saving its last nuclear accord with the United States, due to expire in eight months, given the “ruined” state of relations with Washington, its top arms control official said in an interview published on Friday.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also told TASS news agency that President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense project was a “deeply destabilizing” factor creating formidable new obstacles to arms control.

His comments were among Moscow’s bleakest yet about the prospects for the New START agreement, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries, which caps the number of strategic warheads that each side can deploy.

President Vladimir Putin in 2023 suspended Russian participation in New START, blaming US support for Ukraine, although he said that Russia would remain within the treaty’s limits on warheads, missiles and heavy bomber planes.

But if the treaty is not extended or replaced after it expires on February 5 next year, security experts fear it could fuel a new arms race at a time of acute international tension over the conflict in Ukraine, which both Putin and Trump have said could lead to World War Three.

The Federation of American Scientists, an authoritative source on arms control, says that if Russia decided to abandon the treaty limits, it could theoretically increase its deployed nuclear arsenal by up to 60 percent by uploading hundreds of additional warheads.

Ryabkov described Russia-US ties as “simply in ruins.”

“There are no grounds for a full-scale resumption of New START in the current circumstances. And given that the treaty ends its life cycle in about eight months, talking about the realism of such a scenario is increasingly losing its meaning,” Ryabkov told TASS.

“Of course, deeply destabilizing programs like the Golden Dome – and the US is implementing a number of them – create additional, hard-to-overcome obstacles to the constructive consideration of any potential initiatives in the field of nuclear missile arms control, when and if it comes to that.”

Trump said last month he had selected a design for the $175-billion Golden Dome project, which aims to block threats from China and Russia by creating a network of satellites, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, to detect, track and potentially intercept incoming missiles.

Analysts say the initiative could sharply escalate the militarization of space , prompting other countries to place similar systems there or to develop more advanced weapons to evade the missile shield.

Ryabkov’s comments came in the same week that Ukraine stunned Moscow by launching drone strikes on air bases deep inside Russia that house the heavy bomber planes that form part of its nuclear deterrent.

Russia has said it will retaliate as and when its military sees fit.