For conventional disarmament specialists, Russian prevarication over putting the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE)⁽¹⁾ into force is to a large extent explained by Moscow’s desire to retain sizeable military forces as a counter to those countries that Russia considers hostile, notably Georgia. Be that as it may, on 14 July 2007 Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, signed a decree delaying application of the Treaty indefinitely. This Russian moratorium is just one more among the many things that have happened since the signature of the CFE Treaty on 10 November 1990 and its provisional entry into force on 17 July 1992. The Treaty was originally negotiated during the Cold War, when NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced each other, and yet has managed to survive a multitude of events which ought, by any logic, to have led to its abandonment. Among these, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which in fact negated the balance that the Treaty aimed to establish between the two alliances; the disappearance of the Soviet Union; wars in the Caucasus and, especially, NATO enlargement. Despite all this, the Treaty lives on.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, getting the Treaty up and running has come up against two major objections raised by Russia: the first concerns the flank rules and the second the balance within the Treaty, which has been upset by the integration of former Soviet satellite countries into NATO. These difficulties affect what Russia sees as its greatest problems: its security policy in the Caucasus and the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance. In order to take into account these new geostrategic realities, states parties to the Treaty signed up to the adapted CFE Treaty in November 1999 in Istanbul. This adapted Treaty has never come into force because the essential conditions for its application, which include Russia’s respect of the flank rules in the original Treaty, have never been completely achieved.⁽²⁾ Despite the obvious illogicality of a treaty drawn up on a basis of bloc versus bloc being applied in today’s circumstances, it is nevertheless the original CFE Treaty that continues to function. The fact that the two Treaties exist concurrently is contributing to some degree of confusion.

The Issue of the Fifth ‘Virtual Zone’

Whilst not actually written as such in the Treaty, the expression ‘flank zone’ has been used since the beginning to designate a fifth ‘virtual’ zone alongside the four others that make up the European continent. Article V of the Treaty sets out measures concerning the flank rules which put sub-limits on ground-based Treaty-limited equipment (TLE) in active units. These measures were intended to limit the Soviet Union’s ability to concentrate forces in the Leningrad and North Caucasus military regions in Russia, as well as those in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Article IV added a ban on stationing ground equipment in guarded storage sites in the flank zone, something that was allowed everywhere else. The issue of flank rules has been one of the thorniest problems affecting relations between Russia, and to a lesser degree, Ukraine, and the Atlantic Alliance.