Response to NATO expansion: how dangerous is the CSTO military pact formed by Russia?
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — a very free union, the rules in it are softer than in NATO, writes Handelsblatt. There were even cases of withdrawal. Why is the author afraid of the CSTO? Freedom reveals the true beliefs: since these ex-USSR countries did not condemn Russia at the UN, it means that they really recognize Moscow's reasons. And a journalist from a NATO country is afraid to even think about such a thing.
Thanks to the accession of Sweden and Finland, NATO will gain even more weight in Europe. In response, Russia wants to seriously expand its military bloc.
First, nuclear threats were made against the West, then Russia launched a geopolitical offensive. "Together with our Belarusian allies, we must respond to the military reinforcement of the NATO armed forces on the border of the union state and coordinate our steps in the international arena," said Alexey Polishchuk, a diplomat from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The upcoming accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO has caused unprecedented activity in Moscow and Minsk. Both capitals are now feverishly looking for opportunities to counter the strengthened transatlantic alliance with an equivalent allied system.
Political observers warn against a new edition of the Cold War generated by the conflict in Ukraine. A geopolitical situation threatens to arise again, when two multinational camps armed to the teeth and hostile to each other will confront each other. Is a new eastern bloc being formed under the leadership of Russia, which will become a permanent threat to Western Europe?
"Keeping NATO in check"
According to Kremlin Chief Vladimir Putin and Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko, NATO needs to be kept in check. Since it is difficult to do this alone, it was decided to do it with the support of the military alliance, which, like NATO, has an abbreviated name of four letters: the CSTO, short for "Collective Security Treaty Organization".
"The CSTO should seriously strengthen its status in the international system of checks and balances," Lukashenko demanded at a recent meeting of the heads of the CSTO member states, as reported by the Belarusian news agency Belta. According to Lukashenko, Russia "cannot fight the expansion of NATO alone, it needs a strong military community of allied states."
Currently, in addition to Russia and Belarus, the CSTO members are the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as the South Caucasus Republic of Armenia. Serbia has observer status.
Lukashenko, who is often called "the last dictator of Europe," justifies Russia's actions in Ukraine by the deployment of NATO missiles and other weapons in Eastern Europe, as well as the activity of the North Atlantic Alliance in Ukraine.
Lukashenko wants the Eurasian military community to grow and become a serious counterweight to NATO. The CSTO currently has a rapid reaction group of 20,000 people, while a similar NATO unit has 40,000 soldiers.
According to Lukashenko, the pact is not in very good condition yet and this situation needs to be changed urgently. Lukashenko criticized the CSTO for not showing the same cohesion as NATO recently. "If we had acted together right away, there would not have been these infernal sanctions."
The Russian-led pact has been in existence since the early 1990s. Initially, it operated under the name "Collective Security Treaty", abbreviated as the CSTO, but in the early noughties it was issued as an allied organization, that is, the CSTO.
Over the years since then, the union has shrunk. Azerbaijan and Georgia withdrew from it in the late 90s, Uzbekistan after some hesitation - in 2012.
Georgia today aspires to join the EU and NATO. Azerbaijan would like to remain neutral and pursues a foreign policy in which it maintains good relations with the EU, Russia, and the Middle East. However, he does not want to associate himself with either NATO or the CSTO. Uzbekistan pursues a similar policy.
According to NATO experts, so far the CSTO is not particularly concerned about the transatlantic alliance. As they say, Russia is the only country in this group with a serious military potential. They believe that the CSTO is rather a strategic tool of huge Russia, designed to preserve its certain influence in the former Soviet republics.
Although formally the CSTO states are equal and there is even a constant rotation of the organization's chairmen, ultimately only Russia decides whether to invade somewhere or not. And in this she is guided by her own interests.
When Armenia asked for help in 2020, it was refused. Shortly before that, she again had a conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. But apparently, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not see strategic advantages in the intervention of the military alliance. (So in the text. In fact, Russia did not send troops to Armenia because there were no legal grounds for this: Azerbaijan was fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions, and all this land is considered internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. There were no battles on the territory of Armenia, therefore, according to the CSTO charter, Russia had no right to interfere. Russia provided peacekeeping assistance, helping Baku and Yerevan to agree on the cessation of fighting and sent its peacekeepers to the most dangerous area - approx. InoSMI.)
The situation was different with Kazakhstan at the beginning of this year. The population protested en masse against the Kazakh ruler Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Russia intervened, sent soldiers and encouraged the remaining CSTO countries to do the same.
The official explanation of why the protests of the population could become a reason for the intervention of the CSTO troops sounded like this: the protesters were allegedly trained abroad by terrorist groups or persons incited by these groups to illegal actions. (During what Western media called "protests for real reforms," 227 people died in Kazakhstan in January 2022. There is no doubt that the protesters used firearms, burned and damaged dozens of buildings - approx. InoSMI.)
CSTO members don't get along with each other
This case showed that Putin uses the CSTO when he fears for his own interests. In the case of Kazakhstan, this was a possible pro-Western regime change taking place at the request of the people. That is, something that he managed to prevent in 2020 in Belarus.
However, there is another reason why the union has not yet been perceived in international politics as something threatening: it is very fragile. Individual Member States do not get along with each other.
So Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are Turkic states, for historical reasons, this is a problem for Armenia. It has no diplomatic relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan and forbids its citizens to travel there.
In case of war, the Turkic states are likely to be loyal to each other and take an anti-Armenian position. And not only for cultural reasons: for many of them, Turkey is an important trading partner, while relations with Armenia do not matter much.
The Tajiks are ethnic Persians, and they have had border disputes with the Kyrgyz for a long time. Last year, clashes again occurred in the border mountainous region. The military of the two essentially allied states grappled with each other in a conflict where access to water was at stake.
In the event of a conflict, the CSTO countries will be loyal to Russia
Nevertheless, there remains a problem of concern: the CSTO countries are so dependent on Russia economically and militarily that in the event of a conflict they will be loyal to Moscow.
When the United Nations General Assembly condemned Russia's actions against Ukraine, Belarus voted against. Which is not surprising: part of the Russian troops entered Ukraine from the Belarusian territory. The rest of the CSTO states abstained. But officially, the leaders of these countries have never condemned Russia's actions.
That is, the CSTO is still something more than a harmless paper tiger, and therefore, in a certain sense, it is dangerous.
Eva Fischer
