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.
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.
- Igor Sutyagin, Royal United Services Institute
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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.
its activities under the
CFE, announced by
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
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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
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