Christopher Langton, a defence analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told AFP the collapse of the CFE treaty could prompt a US military build up in response to eastern European security fears.
Europe would risk revisiting "a situation which everybody thought had been left behind in the 1990s."
By Sebastian Smith
President Vladimir Putin's move to suspend Russia from a key Soviet-era arms treaty is more than just Cold War-style rhetoric and could presage a redrawing of the European security map, analysts said Friday.
Putin's statement on Thursday that Moscow was imposing a "moratorium" on its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty raised the stakes in an increasingly bad-tempered debate over the military balance across the continent.
"Russia has switched to the language of ultimatums," Kommersant daily newspaper wrote. Putin "demonstrated that he is ready to step up from words to deeds."
Since 1990 the CFE treaty has imposed strict limits on deployment of tanks, troops and other forces in countries belonging to NATO and to what was then still the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. The deal brought a certain degree of predictability and trust to a divided continent.
Putin is now threatening to tear up the treaty unless all NATO countries ratify a revised, post-Soviet version struck in 1999. NATO members counter they cannot do so because Russia, despite ratifying, is violating its commitments by keeping troops in the former Soviet reupblics of Georgia and Moldova.
The CFE row is at the heart of a complex and accelerating shift in what was once the frozen landscape of an East-West military standoff.
Over the last 15 years NATO has expanded deep into Moscow's former backyard, taking in a swathe from Bulgaria to the Baltic Sea.
Three of the alliance's new members -- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania -- are not signatories to the CFE at all, meaning these ex-Soviet republics are theoretically open to new NATO deployments right on Russia's border.
That, according to some in Moscow, makes the CFE worse than obsolete.
"This is a real threat to our national security," the state-run newspaper Rossiikaya Gazeta wrote.
Washington and its allies devote major diplomatic effort to persuading Moscow of their peaceful intentions, but under Putin Russia has become increasingly suspicious.
The chief bugbear now is a US plan to base a limited anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, two former Warsaw Pact territories that are now in NATO.
According to Washington the shield would be aimed only at minor military powers such as Iran and could have no effect against Russia's enormous missile arsenal. But Moscow describes the system as heralding a creeping NATO advance.
"Ludicrous," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday in Oslo after hearing Moscow's complaint.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus was to repeat NATO's reassurances in more diplomatic fashion during talks with Putin in Moscow on Friday.
But analysts believe Putin has drawn a red line on the anti-missile deployment and that his threat to abandon the CFE treaty must be taken seriously.
The Russian military chief of staff, General Yury Baluyevsky, said Friday he would go to NATO headquarters on May 10 to start negotiations on the treaty's future, Interfax news agency reported.
"The reason for the appearance of these kinds of ideas from the Russian leadership are obvious," RBK daily wrote. "NATO is de facto using the situation around the treaty for the expansion of its troops and the moving of bases up to Russia's borders."
The respected daily quoted a Kremlin source as saying that "in fact there is nothing left to talk about.
"The US is setting up anti-missile defence in eastern Europe, regardless of what Moscow says or does. Putin has also stated Russia's position as clearly as possible. There is no compromise. All we can offer the Czech president is coffee."
Christopher Langton, a defence analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told AFP the collapse of the CFE treaty could prompt a US military build up in response to eastern European security fears.
Europe would risk revisiting "a situation which everybody thought had been left behind in the 1990s."
Russian security analyst Vladimir Yevseyev issued a similar warning.
"Destroying this is very easy. But then there will be nothing left to restrain countries' military forces," he wrote in the Gazeta daily. "The European security system could fall apart."
