Another historic arms control and security agreement between Russia and NATO or its allies has become a dead letter. Following Moscow’s formal withdrawal from a 1990 strategic pact with the Atlantic Alliance, which limited the type and quantity of conventional weapons in Europe, NATO now announces that it is also suspending its participation in the treaty.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, which announced this Tuesday that it had made its withdrawal from the agreement effective at midnight and has stressed that the treaty is “history”, has accused the Atlantic Alliance of failing to comply with the restrictions of the text. NATO has condemned Russia’s decision and stressed that it is undermining Euro-Atlantic security.
The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, imposed verifiable limits on the military equipment that the Atlantic Alliance and the then Warsaw Pact—the Eastern Bloc countries: Soviet republics, East Germany, Poland, etc. could deploy. The agreement was designed to prevent either axis from amassing forces for a rapid offensive against the other on their common borders.
“Russia’s withdrawal is the latest in a series of actions that systematically undermine Euro-Atlantic security,” NATO says in a statement signed by its 31 allies, most of which are signatories to the CFE agreement. “Russia continues to demonstrate disregard for arms control, including the key principles of reciprocity, transparency, compliance, verification and host nation consent, and undermines the rules-based international order,” continues the military organization (of which it is a part Spain), which although defends the treaty as a “cornerstone of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture”, assures that a situation in which the allies respect the treaty, but Moscow does not, would be “unsustainable.”
Russia had already suspended the treaty in 2007 and stopped its active participation in 2015, a year after invading Crimea and illegally annexing the Ukrainian peninsula. Last May, one year after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree denouncing the treaty, which he has completely buried today. “The CFE Treaty was concluded at the end of the Cold War, when the formation of a new global and European security architecture based on cooperation seemed possible and appropriate attempts were made,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
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Moscow accusations
Moscow accuses NATO of “inciting” the conflict in Ukraine, although it was the Kremlin that launched the large-scale invasion more than 600 days ago, and points to Finland’s accession to the pact as one of the factors in its withdrawal from the pact. Atlantic Alliance—triggered by the war against Ukraine and completed last April—and Sweden’s request to join. “The CFE Treaty has become unacceptable from the point of view of Russia’s fundamental security interests,” says Moscow.
Relations between NATO and Russia are at their lowest point since the Cold War over the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, ordered by Putin on February 24, 2022. In recent years, as the Kremlin chief advanced In its imperialist appetite, ties with the Atlantic Alliance – whose expansion towards the east by the own decision of States like Poland has been used by Moscow as an excuse for war – have been cut.
Added to this is Russia’s departure from agreements with the United States (together they possess the vast majority of the most destructive weapons in the world) or the Alliance itself, which built a new security architecture in the Cold War that has collapsed with the invasion. Last week, Moscow withdrew from the global nuclear test ban treaty (CTBTW) intended, like the other agreements, to limit weapons proliferation. The New Start, signed between Washington and Moscow, which establishes verifiable limits on the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles, is also suspended. Donald Trump’s government withdrew the United States from that treaty after accusing Russia of violating it. Last February, Putin assured that he was also suspending the pact.
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