Russian president Vladimir Putin’s move to suspend Russia from a key Soviet-era arms treaty is more than just Cold War-style rhetoric and could presage a redrawing of the European security map, analysts said Friday.
Putin’s statement that Moscow was imposing a “moratorium” on its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty raised the stakes in an increasingly bad-tempered debate over the military balance across the continent.
Since 1990 the CFE treaty has imposed strict limits on deployment of tanks, troops and other forces in countries belonging to Nato and to what was then still the Warsaw Pact.
Putin is now threatening to tear up the treaty unless all Nato countries ratify a revised, post-Soviet version struck in 1999.
Christopher Langton, a defence analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told AFP the collapse of the CFE treaty could prompt a US military build up in response to eastern European security fears.
Europe would risk revisiting “a situation which everybody thought had been left behind in the 1990s.” Russian security analyst Vladimir Yevseyev issued a similar warning.
“Destroying this is very easy. But then there will be nothing left to restrain countries’ military forces,” he wrote in the Gazeta daily. “The European security system could fall apart.”
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