Russia's Federation Council approves withdrawal from CFE Treaty

MOSCOW. May 24 (Interfax) - Russia's Federation Council voted to withdraw from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty) on Wednesday.

The CFE Treaty was signed in Paris on November 19, 1990. It took effect on November 9, 1992.

According to supplementary materials on the withdrawal bill, the CFE Treaty sets quantitative restrictions on members in five categories of conventional forces, namely battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery, warplanes, and combat helicopters.

Russia ratified the CFE Treaty in July 1992. It also ratified an agreement on adaptation of the CFE Treaty dated November 19, 1999, in 2004 but it never took effect. Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia's implementation of the CFE Treaty on July 13, 2007. The suspension was formalized by a federal law of November 29, 2007.

"Article XIX of the CFE Treaty establishes the right of a State Party to withdraw from the Treaty, in exercising its national sovereignty, if it concludes that extraordinary events related to the subject matter to the Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests," the materials said.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said earlier that it would take about six months to complete the process of Russia's withdrawal from the CFE Treaty.

Federation Council Deputy Speaker Konstantin Kosachyov said that the CFE Treaty is a historical anachronism which has become entirely a thing of the past.

The CFE Treaty was signed in 1990 between the NATO countries on the one side and the former USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other, "whose armies were included on our side," Kosachyov said then. "And in line with the CFE Treaty, for instance, our southern flank is still covered by the armies of Romania and Bulgaria, which now looks completely absurd," he added.

Apart from this, "since 1990, NATO has been joined by new states, such as Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which were not on the map in 1990, as well as our former allies Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia," Kosachyov said.

Thirty countries signed an updated version of the agreement "consistent with new realities" at an OSCE summit in Istanbul in 1999, but only four of them - Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine - have ratified it, Kosachyov said.

"As for the NATO countries, they have refused to ratify the treaty on completely farfetched pretexts that have nothing to do with the CFE Treaty. They referred to Russian bases in Georgia, which we eventually withdrew a year ahead of schedule, and a small Russian contingent guarding arms depots in Transdniestria, which would also have been settled if the West hadn't compelled the Moldovan authorities to retract their consent to the so-called Kozak memorandum," Kosachyov said.

Russia suspended its participation in the CFE Treaty in 2007 "until the NATO countries ratify the Agreement on Adaptation of the CFE Treaty and start implementing this document in good faith," he said.

By withdrawing from the treaty Russia is not closing the door to negotiations concerning control over conventional weapons but believes their new types should be borne in mind, such as unmanned aerial vehicles and other systems, Kosachyov said.