Statements on the transformation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization made under the upcoming chairmanship of Belarus are nothing more than "information noise", expert believes.
Last week in Yerevan a session of the Collective Security Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization took place. In 2017 CSTO chairmanship goes to Belarus, which led to a number of loud statements by Aliaksandr Lukashenka on the session results.
"We underlined the fact that that nobody wants to recognize CSTO, especially NATO (you see, the organization is not right). I was listening to them talking and thinking: they will never recognize us if we keep asking for recognition. We must act in such a way to make them recognize our organization", - Lukashenka said in Yerevan, adding that in the course of lengthy negotiations with the leaders of the CSTO member states "a wide range of the topics" was discussed and "a fundamental analysis of the topical world issues" was conducted.
Andrei Parotnikau, the manager of Belarus Security Blog project, believes that the CSTO will stay limited in its breakthrough in the international recognition to the mentioned "discussion of a wide range of topics”. "CSTO is not a full-fledged military-political bloc, as actually are all the post-Soviet integration associations, the creation of which Moscow keeps on initiating. Participants of such associations remain until Russia fails to provide them with something in exchange for their demonstration of political loyalty", - said Andrei Parotnikau in his interview with the "EuroBelarus” Information Service.
According to the expert, the future Belarusian chairmanship factor is of no practical significance for Belarus. "Although it will be used for internal propaganda needs, of course: as a demonstration of yet another success on the international arena, and so on, but this is nothing more than information noise", - Andrei Parotnikau says.
"There’s no conversation about recognition of the CSTO bloc in the West. NATO finds cooperation on a bilateral basis with the post-Soviet countries as enough, - Andrei Parotnikau states. - There is a common, though not officially voiced, position of NATO: no strengthening of Russian influence in the region should be tolerated. And recognition of the CSTO in the West will of course promote such strengthening, given that Russia dominates the CSTO. The same position of CSTO non-recognition is incidentally shared by the head of China, so much loved by our President".
As the manager of Belarus Security Blog project points out, «current political background is even more discouraging from CSTO recognition on the part of NATO: the confrontation between the West and Russia is clearly here to stay for many years and if NATO had a very cool relationship with the CSTO even before the Ukrainian crisis, it’s certainly no use expecting it to get better now ".
At the same time Andrei Parotnikau supposes the CSTO cannot be pronounced absolutely useless, but "the results of the organization's activities can hardly be called military-political". "First of all, there is some progress in law enforcement cooperation: the CSTO regularly conducts various transnational operations such as drug traffic related ones, by the way, the countries not included in the organization take part in them as well. Moreover, the CSTO has a quite good training system on preferential terms for the defense and law enforcement agencies of the participating countries. There’s also a mutual advantage of arms supply on favourable terms ", - Andrei Parotnikau said.
Reference. The Collective Security Treaty Organization declares its aims as "peace-building, international and regional security and stability, protection on the collective independence basis, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Member States achieved mainly by political means as in accordance with the Member States priorities". The CSTO was founded on 15 May 1992 by Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan signing the Collective Security Treaty. Later, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan left the organization.
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