BASIC PAPERS

MAY 1996 • NUMBER 17 • ISSN 1353-0402

Future of the CFE Treaty 

By Jonathan Dean

The Review Conference on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty will be held in Vienna from 15-31 May 1996. Negotiated by NATO and the then Warsaw Pact and signed in 1990, the Treaty is an outstanding arms control achievement, requiring the destruction of over 50,000 items of the most offensive weaponry. BASIC recommends that the Review Conference take the opportunity to look more broadly at the future of the Treaty, including possible applications of the Treaty to sub-regions. We suggest workable ways to continue the reduction process in Europe without the alliance-to-alliance format for negotiations.

• The Flank Issue Negotiations continue on reductions in the size of the flank area designated in the treaty to make the limits--originally negotiated on a group-to-group basis--more acceptable now that the Warsaw Pact has dissolved. This issue arose with a Russian request to permit more Russian armaments in the Caucasus. It has posed serious problems for implementation and Russia considers it grounds for Treaty revision.
  
  

• Other Compliance Issues By the November 1995 deadline, Russia, Armenia and Belarus had still not fulfilled some treaty commitments and question marks hang over compliance in Ukraine, Georgia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Poland.
  
  

• The Review Conference If the flank issue is not resolved prior to the Review Conference, parallel talks will continue during the review itself. Of the main parties involved in the flank issue--the US, Russia and Turkey--only the US has an interest in its early resolution.
  
  

• NATO Enlargement and the CFE Due to the dissolution of the eastern bloc, CFE gives NATO a preponderance over Russia in tanks inside the CFE area, for example, of 20,000 to 6400. If Poland and the Czech Republic were to join NATO, the Alliance's superiority would jump by 3000 tanks. Commitments are needed from NATO not to station foreign forces or nuclear weapons in the new members states--except in circumstances where these states are at war. In addition, NATO could pledge that enlargement would not increase NATO's overall permitted level of treaty-limited arms.
  
  

• The Future of CFE and Arms Control in Europe Western States oppose any renegotiation of the CFE Treaty, for fear that the treaty will unravel. France has suggested that allocations made by NATO and the Warsaw Pact to each of their member nations be codified in the Treaty. Russia also favors this option, but it is likely that the Review Conference will fail to address this or the flank issue conclusively. The Conference should, however, examine ways to continue the reduction process, such as an approach which allocates reductions according to the size of a country's forces and reducing the largest heavy weapons arsenals by 5% per year over ten years. Regional approaches, not only in former Yugoslavia, but also for Ukraine and its neighbors, are well worth investigating.
  

Future of the CFE Treaty
The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) was signed with great ceremony at the Paris Summit of November 1990 to commemorate the end of the cold war military confrontation in Europe, but it is already in considerable danger. Establishing a potential prototype for regional disarmament throughout the world, the treaty eliminated the then-Warsaw Pact's large numerical superiority in conventional armaments over NATO. More important for the present, inside its Atlantic to Urals area of application, CFE established a network of limitations on the heavy armaments and military personnel of each of the 30 states with troops in Europe that are parties to the treaty, including the US and Russia.

These limits provide the foundation of stability and predictability in military relationships indispensable for economic and political cooperation in Europe. But the ongoing dispute over how many Russian heavy arms can be deployed in the Caucasus area of southeastern Russia, the "flank" issue, threatens the structure of the treaty. This and other topics will be discussed at the first Review Conference of the treaty, to be held in Vienna May 15-31, 1996.

The participants in the Vienna Review Conference may be able to contain the flank issue for a further period even if they do not resolve it fully, given the uncertainties over Russia's future position on arms control arising in part from the possible victory of the communist party candidate in the June, 1996 presidential elections. However, the CFE Treaty will remain under pressure and this pressure is likely to increase in 1997 and after, if NATO moves toward extending membership to the Czech Republic and Poland in the face of continued opposition from Russia. In the interim, while the flank issue and the future of Russian participation in CFE preoccupies decision makers in East and West, there is scant prospect of further disarmament in a Europe that remains heavily overarmed.

Background of the Flank Issue
In the area from the Atlantic to the Urals, the CFE Treaty has reduced and now limits individual states' holdings of tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters, as well as limiting the numerical level of active duty ground and air force personnel (nuclear and naval forces were excluded from the treaty's scope by agreement). The treaty parties are the sixteen member countries of NATO, six Eastern European members of the former Warsaw Pact, and eight successor states of the Soviet Union including Russia. The treaty provides for the largest conventional force disarmament in history: over 50,000 pieces of heavy armament have been destroyed under strict multilateral verification.

The source of the most serious current difficulties is the individual armament and manpower ceilings that are the core of the CFE Treaty. Regularly verified, these ceilings provide all participating states with stable military relationships and with assurance that the forces of once feared enemies are not increasing. There have been several irregularities as regards completion of weapons destruction by Russia and some other Soviet Union successor states. These will be briefly discussed later in this article. But more serious than these discrepancies is Russia's failure to comply with an equipment limitation affecting its forces in the Caucasus, the so-called "flank limit."

From the outset of East-West negotiations on conventional force reductions in the early 70s, the NATO "flank" states, Turkey and Norway, located at the southern and northern extremes of NATO's eastward-facing defensive line, insisted that if the Soviet Union ultimately agreed to reduce forces on the central front facing Germany, the withdrawn forces must not be used to build up Soviet forces opposite Norway and Turkey.

To prevent a repetition of the forward-based Soviet force concentrations in the western areas of the then-Soviet Union, concentrations that had caused NATO such concern during the cold war, the CFE Treaty created a series of geographic zones with limits on heavy armaments that could be deployed or stored in them. Most of these restrictions, which included a flank zone along the Turkish and Norwegian borders, were taken over by Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. The southern flank zone now includes the territory of several successor republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova, part of Ukraine, and the North Caucasus Military District of Russia. In the north, the flank zone covers Russian territory in the Northern Military District around St. Petersburg.

At a meeting in Tashkent in May 1992, quotas covering the armaments of the former Soviet Union were allocated among those successor states of the Soviet Union with territory in the CFE area. (The Baltic states and the Central Asian states_except for Kazakhstan which has no arms in the CFE area of coverage but does have a thin sliver of territory in it_are not CFE parties.) The Tashkent allocation of weapons to the flank zones gave Russia a quota of less than half of the weapons of the former Soviet Union in these zones. Highly mobile aircraft and combat helicopters were not included in the flank limits, so Russia received an allocation of 1300 tanks, 1700 artillery pieces and 1400 armored combat vehicles for both of the segments of its portion of the flank zone. A CFE provision requires that a portion of this equipment be stored, so Russia ended up with authorization to deploy a total of 700 tanks, about 1300 artillery pieces and 600 armored combat vehicles in active duty units in both its Northern Military District around St. Petersburg and in the North Caucasus Military District in the south. Together, these two large Districts comprise about half of Russian territory in the Atlantic to Urals area covered by CFE.

In September 1993, the Russian government formally requested revision of the flank limit quotas to permit more Russian armaments_and larger Russian forces_in the Caucasus region. Fighting had already taken place in North Ossetia on the Russian side of the Caucasus Mountains, while the whole area south of the Caucasus Mountains_Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia_was deeply mired in the flames of civil war, ethnic war and secession. Prophetically, the Russian diplomatic note specified the "complicated situation" in Chechnya_Chechnya had seceded from the Russian Federation in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed_among the grounds for increasing its flank limits.

Russia argued that the CFE Treaty was negotiated by and for the old Soviet Union and that Russia faced fundamentally different conditions. Russia considered the Caucasus area facing south into the zone of Islamic fundamentalism one of the most vulnerable segments of Russia's frontiers. Russia insisted that reinforcement of its troops there must be permitted through higher arms limits. The increased limits for tanks and artillery that Russia proposed were not very large_about enough for two light divisions, but it insisted on a hefty increase of the allowance for armored combat vehicles, from 1,400 to nearly 4,000. Russia stressed that it far preferred adjustment of the flank limit to withdrawal from the CFE Treaty, but implied it would consider withdrawal if necessary.

Although the Russian request was not unreasonable in the circumstances, it elicited immediate opposition from NATO. No action was taken on it for a considerable time in the hope that Russia would ultimately drop the matter. Then, starting in December 1994, Russia brought into the North Caucasus Military District for the bloody assault on the Chechen uprising a large number of forces whose heavy arms were considerably more numerous than permitted in the flank limits provision of the CFE Treaty. This excess continued after the final November 1995 deadline for final compliance with treaty provisions. The CFE Treaty does provide some flexibility for temporary increases over force limits, but Russian troops have now been in Chechnya for over fifteen months and their holdings exceed the flexibility allowances. Ukraine too asked for changes in the limits imposed on it, which prevented Ukraine authorities from reinforcing their armed forces in secessionist Crimea. Russian threats of withdrawal from the treaty became more frequent as the flank dispute dragged on and also as Russia reacted against the Western proposal for NATO enlargement.

As the November 1995 compliance deadline neared, Western participants moved to save the treaty. They proposed to ease Russia's situation by leaving the Russian flank quota as it stood numerically, but making the geographic area covered by the sublimit smaller through a process of moving several Russian administrative districts out of the flank zones, both in the north near St. Petersburg and in the Caucasus area, attaching them to the less sensitive Moscow Military District. It was felt that changes in the CFE Treaty map would avoid the difficulty of formally amending the treaty text, which would then have to pass through thirty separate national legislatures. Russia agreed in principle to this concept as a possible solution, but made a counterproposal of its own that had the effect of permitting more Russian soldiers closer to the Norwegian and Turkish borders as well as of increasing the total area to be subtracted from the current zones. Although Norway finally agreed to the Russian counterproposal, Turkey refused to do so. Technically, as a result, Russia was not in compliance with the CFE Treaty when the November deadline passed. Its units in the flank area held about 5,000 items of treaty-limited equipment over the prescribed limits. However, on November 17, 1995, all thirty parties to CFE reached agreement to negotiate the flank issue further, and their declaration had the effect of stopping the clock on compliance.

And negotiations continued despite passage of the deadline. Sensibly, the NATO states wanted to prevent the flank issue from becoming a domestic political issue about trust in the new Russia in the United States and other Western countries and they succeeded keeping the issue off the front pages. Russia cut back its requirements and provided a timetable for withdrawal of some of its troops from Chechnya. Turkey, despite the fact that it was in the throes of forming a new government, moved a little as to areas where it would accept Russian troops. Western officials continued to hope that it would be possible to find a solution of the flank issue prior to the Review Conference for the CFE Treaty, scheduled for May 15-31, 1996.

The subject was discussed by Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin at the G7 Summit in Moscow in mid-April. Apparently Russia indicated some willingness to accept the latest US proposal for modifying the Russian flank zones. Nonetheless, these hopes may not be fulfilled. Although all other CFE parties want the treaty to continue, three main actors are now involved on the flank issue: the U.S., Turkey and Russia. Of the three, only the U.S. has strong interest in early resolution of the problem. Turkey has an ingrained suspicion of Russia, an historic opponent in many wars. The Turkish government is slow to act, tenacious in holding to its positions and grudging in concessions. Security issues like the flank question have to have the agreement of the Turkish general staff. Nonetheless, Turkey understands the virtue of the CFE in providing an enduring limit on Russian forces.

Russia's relationship with the CFE is more complex. The Russian military clearly understand the merits of force limits on their former NATO antagonists and on their own successor state neighbors. But, as in the case of the INF and the START I treaties, they consider that former President Mikhail Gorbachev was overly generous to Western interests in concluding the CFE Treaty. Its implementation has been both a restriction on Russian force deployments and a source of considerable expense for weapons destruction. Russian political leaders consider their demands for increases in Russia's flank limits fully justified in terms of Russian national security interests, and they have low motivation to make concessions before the June presidential elections in Russia; moves toward the Western position could well be attacked by Yeltsin's nationalistic political opponents as a surrender of Russian national interests. Indeed, the slowly emerging issue for CFE is whether it will hold in the long term as a structure for limiting Russian as well as Western forces.

Other Compliance Issues
As of November 1995, Russia had a shortfall in weapons destruction from the huge equipment cache the Soviet government had moved beyond the Urals while the CFE Treaty was being negotiated in order to avoid this equipment falling under treaty provisions for destruction. Of this equipment, Russia pledged in a political commitment outside the treaty to destroy or convert 6000 tanks, 7000 artillery pieces and 1500 armored combat vehicles. But in November 1995, it was approximately 9000 weapons short of these figures, more than half of the total. Russia claims that many of these weapons, stored in the open, are no longer usable and explains that its shortfall in compliance is caused by shortage of money to pay for destruction. This problem could probably be resolved by some informal verification to confirm that most of the equipment has become unusable. Russia also appears to have a modest surplus in tanks deployed with active duty units in the whole of western Russia. Moreover, Russia has failed to comply fully with understandings on equipment of naval infantry units and Strategic Rocket Forces as well as with reporting requirements on several items.

As regards compliance problems of other CFE participants, Armenia has excess armored combat vehicles, Belarus has surplus tanks, armored combat vehicles and combat aircraft and is behind in its schedule for destroying reduced equipment. Over the past two years Belarus suspended weapons destruction two or three times, claiming excessive cost, and on one occasion, President Lukachenko implied Belarus might need the weapons if NATO expanded. Georgia is behind in the periodic notification of weapons holdings required by the treaty. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland appear to have categorized some equipment for export instead of destroying it. Ukraine has surplus equipment in active duty units, including some in naval infantry units involved in the dispute with Russia over dividing the equipment of the Black Sea Fleet.

The Review Conference
With the exception of the controversy over the Russian flank limits and of undestroyed Russian equipment stored beyond the Urals, most of these issues are of limited importance. As the review conference approached, Western officials continued to hope that it would be possible to find some solution of the flank issue before the review started and that as a result, the review conference could be of routine nature and would focus on the record of treaty participants in reducing and eliminating their excess arms holdings_a genuine success story. If the flank issue is not resolved before the review conference begins, there will probably be a fairly high pressure negotiation on the flank issue parallel to the review itself. If this does not succeed, there will be embarrassment for Western governments, especially the Clinton government, who may have to face domestic political criticism for being "soft" on the Russians. Nonetheless, the subject will probably be handed back to the treaty's consultative group to work on further, together with the project for treaty "modernization."

Both France and Russia have given notice of their desire to "modernize" the CFE Treaty. France has suggested that limits on the arms holdings of individual parties to the treaty be given formal status through amendment of the treaty. The CFE Treaty originally established overall limits on the holdings of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, leaving it to the members of each military grouping to assign national limits to its individual members. Post reduction levels were allocated by NATO to its member states and by the Warsaw Pact to its members before its dissolution (and then by the Tashkent agreement among the Soviet successor states). These limits were then notified to all other participants and are regarded as binding, but they are not specified in the text of the treaty itself. France argues that, after dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and of the Soviet Union, individual CFE limits should have a treaty basis that reflects the new circumstances so that there will be clarity about these issues for the future. In particular, France appears to be motivated by long-term concerns about Russia and possibly by residual concerns about enduring limits on German forces.

Russia too has proposed modernization and replacement of Alliance limits by explicit national ceilings through amendment of the CFE Treaty. As matters now stand in CFE, Russia has a national ceiling in practice because it has no allies with whom to negotiate flexible changes, while NATO countries officially still only have an overall alliance limit. This circumstance is galling to Russia. There is also little doubt that Russia intends to get satisfaction on the flank limit issue through amending the CFE Treaty if the current negotiations fail. For their part, the United States and other NATO members view with apprehension any renegotiation of the text of the CFE Treaty, fearing that disagreement over possible amendments could lead to the unraveling of the treaty itself. Consequently, they hope to hand off to a working group further discussion of treaty amendment, possibly for report to the summit meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe planned for Lisbon in December, 1996. Meanwhile, NATO members are hoping against hope that some solution of the flank issue will cause Russian interest in treaty amendment to decline and that the amendment project will lose steam and fade away.

NATO Enlargement and the CFE Treaty
That is one possible outcome, but not the only one. Russia shows no sign either of relaxing its interest in changing the flank limits or of relenting in its opposition to NATO enlargement. And, if Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov is elected President of Russia in June 1996, his administration will probably be less interested in disarmament than that of Yeltsin, while Russian opposition to NATO expansion is also likely to intensify. At the same time, one reason why the U.S., Germany, the UK and other NATO countries want to lock in the text of the CFE Treaty now through reaching agreement on the flank issue is to have a free hand to move ahead with NATO enlargement in 1997. Consequently, unless the U.S. can find some effective way to make NATO enlargement acceptable to Russia, there may be in future a major East-West set-to involving the future of CFE.

Some Russians argue that Russia should not ratify START II unless Western countries relinquish the NATO enlargement. But the CFE Treaty covering the conventional armed forces of all NATO members and candidate members in Eastern Europe is more directly related to NATO enlargement than START II. If Poland and the Czech Republic are taken into NATO, their forces will become part of the NATO Alliance and NATO's preponderance over a Russia that is now largely on its own_already 20,000 tanks to 6400--inside the CFE area to the Urals_will become larger by 3000 tanks.

The least that can be done to prevent NATO enlargement from dealing CFE a fatal blow is to provide Russia with assurances that enlargement would not mean an increase in NATO preponderance over Russia. Commitments are needed from NATO not to station foreign forces or nuclear weapons in the new member states_except in circumstances where these states are at war. In addition, NATO could pledge that NATO enlargement would not increase NATO's overall permitted level of treaty-limited arms. Carrying out this pledge would require renegotiation of ceilings among NATO members. For example, NATO's quota of 20,000 tanks would have to be divided among eighteen instead of sixteen member states. However, this action would cause only a few additional reductions, because the actual holdings of most NATO members are well below their individual quotas. This pledge would be in the spirit of the CFE Treaty, which obliges members of NATO and of the former Warsaw Pact to adjust force levels among themselves to absorb increases in the forces of individual member states in a given alliance so that the total level for the alliance does not go up. (The rather legalistic NATO claim is that this provision refers only to the NATO alliance as it was constituted at the time of signature and not to the possibility of new members.)

The Future of the CFE and of Arms Control in Europe
Through its structure of individual national limits and through the provisions for verifying these obligations over the years, the CFE Treaty provides predictability and assurance in military relationships in Europe_between the NATO states and Russia, among Eastern European countries with historic suspicions, like Hungary and Romania, among Germany and its neighbors, and among Russia and its neighbors.

Without the framework of CFE obligations, there would be incessant worry in European capitals about what countries like Russia and Germany were doing in the military field, continual shifts in the composition and size of national armed forces in Europe, and ceaseless jockeying for military advantage among European states, big and small. In a situation where there is justified worry about nationalist trends in Russian policy, present and future, a treaty limit on the size of that part of Russian forces deployed west of the Urals is an important reassurance. Without the CFE, most European governments would spend their time worrying about each other's military activities instead of thinking how they can cooperate on political and economic issues. In this sense, CFE is necessary to the slow process of democratization of Russia, to the forward movement of the European Union, and to the effective operation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

There is a lot riding on the continuation of this treaty. The CFE Treaty is very much worth saving through serious Western consideration of Russian counterproposals to make the flank limits more acceptable by further cutting back the size of the flank areas, and through Western assurances to Russia on how military aspects of NATO expansion might be handled.

The highly charged flank issue has almost totally absorbed the energies of member state officials dealing with CFE. This means that at the CFE Review Conference, participants will devote very little attention to the question of whether there should be follow-on negotiations of some kind providing for further reductions in European forces.

There are still far too many weapons in Europe, especially with Russia becoming more nationalistic. Further negotiated reductions are needed. There are workable ways to continue the reduction process in Europe. Although alliance-to-alliance negotiations are no longer possible owing to dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, it would be possible in a follow-on agreement to negotiate useful reductions in the forces of all thirty CFE participants as well as of Sweden, Finland and Austria by placing all of these states in one of three categories, large, medium, or small, according to their present total holdings of reducible weapons. For example, the U.S. Germany and Russia would be in the category of large states having over 2000 tanks and 600 combat aircraft. Countries like Armenia, Moldova and Norway would be in the third category, with under 1000 tanks and 200 combat aircraft. Over a ten year period, holdings of heavy equipment might be reduced by 5% a year for those in the category of large forces, 3% for those having medium forces and 1-2% for those having small forces.

But there is little motivation for negotiation on further conventional reductions in Europe. Thus far, efforts have failed to gain agreement of the European neutrals to freeze their forces in a pattern which would conform to the CFE Treaty and thus provide a Europe-wide system of similar controls that could serve as the basis for Europe-wide reductions. The European neutrals have been reluctant to accept vigorous verification of these limits meeting CFE standards. Moreover, NATO's out of area deployment in Bosnia and Russia's military involvement in conflicts in neighboring republics have strengthened arguments for retaining extra forces for force projection and peacekeeping. For its part, Russia is more interested in keeping its declining armed forces alive than in negotiating further reductions, although it would be a worthwhile tactic for some future Russian leader to save money on smaller, more capable forces by challenging the Western states to cut back together. In Western Europe, defense budgets are under fiscal pressure but hard pressed defense establishments generally feel that proposing to negotiate further reductions would encourage rather than stave off further budget cuts. The United States in particular is reluctant to move toward a negotiation on force reductions which, whether or not successful, could create stronger congressional pressures for U.S. force reductions in Europe.

It may be possible to proceed on a subregional basis. Officials of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are charged with negotiating disarmament in former Yugoslavia under the Dayton accords. One desirable project they are now studying is to extend some version of the CFE to this area. Given the East-West tensions building up around Ukraine, another regional project worth consideration would be to focus confidence-building and force reduction negotiation on Ukraine and its neighbors. Establishing a keep-out zone for ground or air forces on the Russian-Ukrainian border would not provide a lasting answer in a crisis situation, but it could buy time.

It is doubtful, however, whether successful pan-European negotiation on conventional disarmament will again be feasible unless and until a larger, more universal security structure for Europe than NATO can be developed, an organization encompassing all of the states of Western and Eastern Europe, including Russia and the successor states that are parties to CFE--perhaps a treaty-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe with increased standing and powers. Establishing such an organization could provide the motivation for a general reduction in European armed forces. But that point is distant. For the foreseeable future, despite growing East-West tensions that argue for more attention to arms control, the CFE participants--at least the Western ones--will focus on keeping what they have.

Jonathan Dean is an Adviser on International Security Issues at Union of Concerned Scientists

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