You're reading: Russia suspends participation in Conventional Armed Forces joint consultative group from March 11

MOSCOW - The head of the Russian delegation to the Vienna talks over military security and arms control, Alexander Mazur told the Joint Consultative Group (JCG) over the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) that Russia is suspending its participation at JCG meetings.

“Russia has decided to suspend its participation in JCG sessions from March 11, 2015. Thus, the suspension of the CFE treaty announced by Russia in 2007 becomes complete,” Mazur was quoted as saying on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website on Tuesday.
“This move by Russia does not signify its refusal from further dialogue over conventional arms control in Europe, if and when our partners are ripe for it. We are still ready to work jointly over the new regime for conventional arms control that meets both Russia’s and other European nations’ interests,” Mazur said.
He asked Belarus to represent its interests at subsequent JCG meetings.
For years Russia has been doing all it can to keep the conventional arms control regime viable: it proposed negotiations over CFE adaptation and ratified the adaptation agreement, Mazur said.
“Regrettably, NATO countries chose to effectively bypass the CFE treaty by enlarging the alliance while using trumped-up pretexts to prevent the adaptation agreement from coming into effect. This course, pursued despite our repeated warnings about it being bad for the conventional arms control regime, has led to the inevitable: suspension of the CFE treaty by the Russian Federation in 2007,” Mazur said.
“At the time, Russia, in view of the requests from several CFE members, made an exception by deciding to continue working in the JCG. We thought this platform would also be used to devise a new regime for conventional armed forces control,” the Russian diplomat said.
“However, these hopes were not to become a reality. At the insistence of NATO countries, the dialogue over the future conventional arms control, which as a matter of fact was not held in the JCG format, was suspended in 2011 and has not resumed since. Effectively, the work of the JCG was scaled down almost entirely, resuming only occasionally in the run-up to an odd meeting of the OSCE foreign ministers,” Mazur said.
“Western partners have regularly used this platform to direct their ritualistic appeals to Russia, which have nothing to do with reality, to go back to complying with the old CFE version that is detrimental for us. Under these conditions, continuing our participation at JCG meetings, which amount to nothing more than just reading of an agenda, become pointless for Russia from the political and practical points of view, and unjustifiably expensive from the financial and economic standpoint,” Mazur said.