Bargaining goes on: Lukashenka disrupted CSTO military exercises

The military exercises scheduled for August 19 were delayed for an indefinite term – the CSTO failed to agree the exercise holding with Minsk.

The Russian mass media learnt from a source in the CSTO Secretariat about the delay of the large-scale military exercises of the Collective Rapid Response Forces of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) “Cooperation 2009”.

We remind that the Collective Rapid Response forces were to start training in Kazakhstan on Wednesday August 19. The Ministry of Defence of Kazakhstan confirmed the putting-off. “The parties are being settled the date,” a representative of the ministry said. The objective of the must-have-been training was using the collective forces to prevent and if necessary liquidate a military threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity of the CSTO member-states. The active stage of the exercises was supposed to take place on October 14, 2009 with involvement of the CSTO member-states, Russian “Gazeta” runs.

A decision to form the Collective Rapid Response Forces was taken at a special session of the Collective Security Treaty Organization on February 2, 2009, by the heads the CSTO member-states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The CSTO is a military and political formation established by the CIS countries on the base of the Collective Security Treaty signed on May 15, 1992. The treaty is tacitly extended every five years.

The Collective Rapid Response Forces (CRRF) are joint military forces of the CSTO member-states. They are supposed to be maintained in constant combat readiness to react to emergencies, military aggression, terrorism, organized crime, and drug trafficking. The CRRF are classifies as an analogue of the Warsaw Pact, but represent a new public and political formation.

However, not all CSTO member-states signed the Agreement on CRRF creation in Moscow on June 14 – Belarus ignored the participation in the document. Minsk refused to sign the agreement due to the so called milk war between Russia and Belarus. Nevertheless, all necessary agreements on the CRRF were reached and Dmitry Medvedev said Belarus would join the document later.

The last CSTO summit was held in Cholpon-Ate on Issyk Kul Lake (Kyrgyzstan) on July 31. It gathered all heads of the member-states, including Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The Belarusian ruler promised to sign the Agreement on the CRRF as soon as possible and take the presidency of the CSTO that Minsk should have taken at the June summit in Moscow.

The CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha said a week later that the military exercises of the Collective Rapid Response Forces scheduled for August 19 would take place although Lukashenka hadn’t signed the agreement. Bordzyuzha noted that there were no legal obstacles to carry out the training as the presidents of the rest countries had signed the documents on the CRRF formation. Bordyuzha stressed that the CRRF couldn’t be considered the CSTO forces unless Belarus joined the agreement.

He emphasized that Minsk would sign the paper in the nearest time and said the delay in initialling of the agreement was “technical”. Analytics, however, put this in doubt.

“The delay in signing the CRRF agreement is not technical. Belarus is just bargaining with Russia. If it didn’t bargain, the document could have been signed on Issyk Kul. If the technical problems were the cause, it wouldn’t have taken much time to solve them. At least, the date of signing would have been defined,” Aleksey Makarkin, the vice president of the Center of Political Technologies, said.

It should be noticed that the military exercises of the CSTO must have started yesterday, but the training of the CRRF are planned for October in Kazakhstan. If Lukashenka refuses to signed the CRRF agreement, the October military manoeuvres won’t have relation to the CSTO formal legal point of view.

However, the secretariat builds plans to prepare the CRRF troops. Bordyuzha said the military exercises might be held in Armenia next year, though it was supposed earlier to have CSTO manoeuvres every other year due to the economic crisis.