Russia quits arms pact as estrangement with Nato grows.

Russia quits arms pact as estrangement with Natogrows

Kathrin Hille in Moscow and Neil Buckley in London

Russia has pulled out of a forum for discussing conventional arms control in Europe, closing another channel of communication with the west on security issues.
The move underlines Moscow’s conviction that it no longer feels bound to a longstanding security architecture on the continent that it now considers broken.
The Russian delegation was withdrawing from the Joint Consultative Group on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) as of Wednesday, the foreign
ministry said on Tuesday night.
Signed in 1990 by the then 16 members of Nato and six members of the Warsaw Treaty, the CFE treaty had been seen as a pillar of a post-cold war security system. It set ceilings for the level of conventional arms systems signatories were allowed to deploy and established verification and confidence-building measures.
Igor Sutyagin, a specialist on the Russian military at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said Moscow’s withdrawal was important because the consultative group was used to discuss issues of concern to both sides.
“This [group] is a confidence-building measure. What Russia is doing now is undermining confidence, to keep the west nervous and keep it off balance,” he said.
“This is a message to the west that we are not going to discuss our concerns with you, and you will not have a chance to ask us questions. We are going to be really hostile,” he added.
Moscow has been complaining since the 1990s that it felt encircled by Nato and that its security was being compromised by the alliance’s enlargement — a complaint the Kremlin has used to justify its actions in the Ukraine crisis over the past year.

The CFE treaty has long been undermined by this controversy. After the

What Russia is

start of Nato enlargement in the late 1990s, Russia began to accuse Nato of violations, while Nato complained that Moscow was in breach. In 1999, signatories agreed an adapted version, but this was never ratified because Nato members insisted Russia had to withdraw all its troops from former Soviet territories such as Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova.
In 2007, Moscow announced it was suspending its participation in the treaty. Since then, the Joint Consultative Group was the only forum that Russia continued to attend.

doing now is undermining confidence, to keep the west nervous and keep it off balance
- Igor Sutyagin, Royal United Services Institute
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The Russian government said on Tuesday it had continued to participate in that group because it had hoped the meetings would be used for the development of a new regime of conventional arms control. “However, these hopes did not come true,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that meetings had been reduced to readings of the agenda and accusations against Russia from other members. “The suspension of its activities under the CFE, announced by Russia in 2007, is now complete,” it said.
Mr Sutyagin said withdrawal from the group was not necessarily in Russia’s own interests, but matched the Kremlin’s policy of identifying areas of importance to the west and then withdrawing co-operation. In the course of their stand-off over Ukraine, Moscow and Nato have closed several channels for dialogue and exchanges.

The suspension of
its activities under the
CFE, announced by

Military experts said Moscow’s latest move did not affect the Vienna
Document and the Open Skies Treaty, two elements of the crumbling
European security architecture under which Russia and western
countries can verify troop and arms deployments on each other’s

Russia in 2007, is now complete

- Russian foreign ministry
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territories.
Both mechanisms have been used extensively during the Ukraine crisis, but defence experts say the crisis has also proven that they are of little use in detecting real threats. Three weeks ago, Turkey, Ukraine and the

Netherlands inspected Russian military facilities in the Rostov region near the Ukrainian border and did not find violations by Moscow. However, military officials said because the mechanisms only covered military sites registered by members, they failed to help detect troop build-ups such as those Nato officials have said Russia conducted during the war in eastern Ukraine.