Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Zakharov
[REGNUM] On the night of November 7, Russia completed the procedure for withdrawing from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), as officially announced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The document, which was signed by NATO countries and participants in the then-undissolved Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War, has now “ finally become history for us.”
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The initiative to denounce the CFE Treaty belongs to Vladimir Putin - the president signed the corresponding law at the end of May.
Russia does not currently see the possibility of concluding agreements with NATO countries in the field of control over armed forces, the Foreign Ministry said in a message about the final passing of the CFE Treaty into history.
WHAT DID “OVERCOMING THE DIVISION OF EUROPE” LEAD TO?
The CFE Treaty was signed in Paris in 1990. The preamble of the document is in the style of the rhetoric of detente, “new thinking” and “a common European home from the Atlantic to the Urals” adopted 30 years ago - with the obligatory mention of “the desire to replace military confrontation with a new character of security relations” and “overcoming the division of Europe.”
The purpose of the treaty was declared to be a military balance in Europe through the reduction of conventional weapons.
“When the agreement was concluded, then there was still the Warsaw Pact, and we agreed that there would be a certain number of tanks, guns, artillery systems, missile systems on both sides, the Warsaw Pact and NATO,” military expert Vladimir reminded IA Regnum Gundarov . It is significant that less than six months remained from the signing of the CFE Treaty to the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact Organization - the “Eastern Bloc” ceased to exist in June 1991.
After the self-destruction of one of the contracting parties, the USSR, eight former Soviet republics (Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine) concluded the Tashkent Agreement in 1992, additional to the CFE Treaty. According to this document, the newly independent countries distributed the rights and responsibilities of the USSR regarding conventional weapons. Then Russia's quota was 6,400 tanks, 11,480 armored vehicles, 6,415 artillery systems, 3,450 aircraft and 890 helicopters.
The CFE Treaty envisaged a reduction in armaments in Europe, but the alliance began to expand eastward - and the number of NATO weapons exceeded the figures specified in the treaty.
In 1999, in connection with the accession of some former Warsaw Pact members to NATO, the document was updated at the OSCE summit in Istanbul.
The updated agreement was ratified only by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine (where Leonid Kuchma, a multi-vector advocate, was then in power). Georgia and Moldova demanded that Russia “withdraw troops” from their territory. Tbilisi, Chisinau, as well as NATO countries blocked the process of ratification of the document. Moscow noted: the agreements with Georgia and Moldova, signed in Istanbul, have nothing to do with the CFE Treaty, and therefore cannot be an obstacle to the ratification of the document.
THE WEST WAS GIVEN A CHANCE TO “CORRECT”
As a result, by the beginning of the 2000s the situation looked like this: Russia adapted the old CFE Treaty to the new situation, “when there is no Warsaw Pact.” Moscow ratified this “upgraded” document in the 1999 version. “NATO refused to do this. Therefore, we waited several years, as you know, then we said: “Well then, excuse me,” noted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2014 .
But until a certain point, the Russian side was in no hurry to denounce.
An intermediate point in the history of the CFE Treaty was set in 2007. At that time, Moscow still left the “Western partners” the opportunity to fulfill their obligations. Russia suspended its participation in the Treaty.
The certificate to Putin’s then decree stated : NATO has directly exceeded the limits established by the Treaty, and the United States is deploying its military bases on the territory of Bulgaria and Romania (which entered the alliance during the large, fifth expansion of 2004).
Moscow suspended the Treaty until “NATO countries ratify the Adaptation Agreement and begin to implement this document in good faith.” The “Western partners” have demonstrated the opposite: the alliance is not going to compromise, and there is no visible solution to the problems of adaptation and implementation of the CFE Treaty.
Then, in the mid-2000s, it became obvious: NATO would not negotiate with us on changes to the CFE Treaty taking into account the new situation (that is, taking into account the expansion of the alliance and the inadequacy of the restrictions in force since 1990), military observer Ilya Kramnik told IA Regnum . The new Eastern European members of the alliance generally refused any negotiations within the framework of the CFE Treaty.
After 2007, NATO indefinitely suspended its participation in the treaty, at the same time accusing Moscow of undermining Euro-Atlantic security.
In the end, everything came to the expected final point. “33 years have passed, everything has changed, history has changed. Nobody needs this agreement anymore,” including the 1999 version, Timofey Bordachev , program director of the Valdai Club , told IA Regnum .
TWO RUDIMENTS
With the final “funeral” of the CFE Treaty , two more documents from the end of the Cold War lost their force for Russia.
The first is the Budapest Agreement of November 3, 1990 on the maximum levels for the availability of conventional weapons and equipment of the six member states of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. It was concluded with the aim of determining the levels of conventional weapons for each of the participants in the Warsaw Warfare.
And this is a clear anachronism, since in the years after the collapse of the Department of Internal Affairs there was “an erosion of arms control against the background of deepening dividing lines in Europe , ” explained the head of our delegation at the negotiations in Vienna on military security and arms control, Konstantin Gavrilov .
The second “dead man” is the so-called Flank Document of May 31, 1996, adopted against the backdrop of the end of the First Chechen War. The agreement concerned the so-called flank restrictions. Based on the original version of the CFE Treaty, Russia could have “on the flanks” - in the Leningrad and North Caucasus military districts - no more than 700 tanks, 580 armored vehicles and 1,280 artillery systems.
With the start of the First Chechen Campaign, the “flank” quotas for the North Caucasus were formally violated by Moscow. Then the “Western partners” agreed to Moscow’s repeated requests. The Pskov region in the North and, more importantly, a number of regions adjacent to the North Caucasus were excluded from the “flank zones”: the Volgograd, Astrakhan regions, the eastern part of Rostov and the corridor in the south of the Krasnodar Territory.
Now this monument to the big politics of the 1990s will take a more appropriate place - in the textbooks of the history of diplomacy - in the same place as the CFE Treaty itself.
WHAT'S NEXT?
At the same time, judging by the statements of Lavrov’s department, Russia is not burning bridges, but is ready to return to developing new agreements - but with unconditional consideration of Russian interests.
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“Only when life forces them (NATO countries) to return to constructive and realistic positions could the corresponding dialogue be revived as part of efforts to form a new European security system that meets the interests of Russia and all other countries that reject the dictates of the West,” the Foreign Ministry emphasized .
Moscow’s position is known to the West, it is “set out in the proposals that Russia made in December 2021, an attempt to discuss which with the West preceded the transition of the Ukrainian situation into a military-technical channel,” and these proposals are still relevant, believes Timofey Bordachev.
At the end of 2021, we recall, Moscow proposed excluding further expansion of NATO and the bloc’s military activity in the post-Soviet space, as well as Ukraine’s joining the alliance.
An idea was also put forward - Russia and NATO countries would return to the level of armaments as of May 27, 1997 (that is, to the level that existed before joining the alliance of Eastern European countries). However, at that time the West simply laughed at Moscow’s proposals, Gundarov notes. And this is not the only reason for the complexity of future negotiations, the expert says.
“To continue the dialogue, it is necessary to determine how many weapons there will be in Eastern Europe and in Europe in general, and how many weapons we will have,” the expert points out. “ To reach parity, it is necessary to remove American missile defense launchers, reduce the number of tanks and aircraft, stop military flights of NATO strategic aviation over the Baltic, and so on.” That is, to return to the situation of 1991, when parity in the number of conventional weapons on the continent was possible - which, frankly, looks unrealistic, Gundarov notes.
Among other things, much in the hypothetical dialogue will depend on the course of the SVO, Kramnik points out. Moscow's negotiating positions (and the very fact of these negotiations) will depend on the degree of success of our troops in conducting combat operations and achieving their goals. First, Russia needs to successfully complete the Northern Military District, and then it will be possible to return to discussions, the military expert summarizes.
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