No arms build up during treaty moratorium: Russia

By RIA Novosti

Moscow : Russia will not scale up armament for the duration of a declared moratorium on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, a senior Defence Ministry official told Russia’s parliament Wednesday.


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“Measures to build up arms are hypothetical, or science fiction,” Major General Vladimir Nikishin, deputy head of a ministry, told Russia’s lower house, the State Duma.

In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a moratorium on the CFE Treaty, which limits Russian and NATO conventional forces and heavy weaponry from the Atlantic to the Urals.

No NATO country has ratified the treaty’s amended version.

The president’s announcement came after a tense conference in Vienna, where NATO member states refused to ratify the amended CFE Treaty until Russia fully withdraws its troops from Georgia and Moldova, a commitment given by the late President Boris Yeltsin in Istanbul in 1999.

The CFE Treaty was amended in 1999 in Istanbul in line with post-Cold War realities, and has so far only been ratified by Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine.

Nikishin said NATO had substantially exceeded armament levels allowed by the CFE for NATO members – by 6,000 tanks, some 10,000 armoured vehicles, over 5,000 artillery items and some 1,500 aircrafts.

He said this was due to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania joining NATO in 2004.

Nikishin said Russia should not stop negotiations with Western partners on participation in international military agreements.

Moscow considers the original CFE Treaty, signed in 1990 by 30 countries to reduce conventional military forces on the continent, outdated since it does not reflect the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the break up of the Soviet Union or recent NATO expansion.

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