Turkey and Belarus Withdraw from CFE Treaty

The Black Friday of security architecture in post-Cold War Europe. On April 5, 2024, two other countries, Turkey and Belarus, announced the “suspension” of their participation in the historic Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, also known as the CFE Treaty.

The actions by Ankara and Minsk followed similar decisions by the USA, European countries, and Russia, which, after “suspending” its participation in 2007, announced its formal withdrawal in November 2023, accusing the United States of “undermining security in Europe in the years after the Cold War with the eastward expansion of the Atlantic Alliance.”

The CFE Treaty was originally signed in Paris on November 19, 1990 by 16 member states of the NATO bloc and 6 former Warsaw Pact countries. The treaty established a substantial balance in conventional arms between Western and Eastern European countries, significantly limiting all key categories of non-nuclear armed forces, from tanks and armored vehicles to combat aircraft, helicopters, and artillery.

The CFE Treaty, signed a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was designed to prevent either side of the Cold War from amassing forces for a quick offensive against the other side in Europe. It can be said that the signing of the Treaty, highly unpopular with the Russian military because it weakened the Soviet Union’s conventional arms advantage, was imposed by the United States on then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Russia suspended participation in the CFE Treaty in 2007, ceased active participation entirely in 2015, and just over a year after the outbreak of the armed conflict with Ukraine, in May 2023, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree denouncing the treaty. “The CFE Agreement was signed at the end of the Cold War when the formation of a new architecture for global and European security based on cooperation seemed feasible, and corresponding efforts were made to build it,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, according to which “the United States initiated the expansion of NATO and the accession of Finland and Sweden – as a result, alliance countries began to openly circumvent the group restrictions imposed by the CFE Agreement, which has lost connection with reality.”