Russia fulfilled its commitments on withdrawal of troops from Moldova, says Russian Foreign Minister

Russia long ago fulfilled all the commitments it assumed at the Istanbul OSCE Summit, Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov told the German publication Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview, referring to Moscow’s decision to suspend the CFE Treaty. Russia does not have in Moldova the heavy weapons stipulated in the Treaty, Lavrov said. He specified that the peacekeeping forces work in Moldova with Chisinau’s consent. A subdivision guards about 20,000 tonnes of munitions that cannot be withdrawn owing to the Transnistrian conflict. The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty), signed in Paris on November 19, 1990, by the 22 members of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact, is a landmark arms control agreement that established parity in major conventional forces/armaments between East and West from the Atlantic to the Urals. Following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the enlargement of NATO in the 1990s, the then 30 CFE States Parties signed the Adaptation Agreement at the Istanbul OSCE Summit on 19 November 1999, to amend the CFE Treaty to take account of the evolving European geo-strategic environment. A number of states, including Moldova and Georgia, say that the entering into force of the Adapted CFE Treaty is delayed because Russia does not fulfil its Istanbul commitments among which to withdraw the armament and troops from Transnistria.