The CSTO, a military alliance in the service of Russia

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), whose troops have been sent to quell the unrest in Kazakhstan, was born on May 14, 2002 as a defensive alliance of countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, led by Russia and joined by Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Its real start-up took place the following year, with the creation of the Unified General Staff and the agreement for the financing of the organization.

Already qualified from the moment of its foundation as the “new Warsaw Pact” of the Russian rear, the CSTO involved the transformation into a military structure, under a single command, of the Collective Security Treaty (TSC) signed in 1992 by member countries of the the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which comprised ten of the fifteen former Soviet republics.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out at the time of the creation of the CSTO that it “is not directed against someone in particular, but against the threat that the world is currently facing”, referring to international terrorism, his The start-up was interpreted as a Russian response to the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Baltic countries and to the deployment of the United States in the former Soviet territory.

In 2009, during the summit held in June, the CSTO created a rapid reaction force to fight against terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking, permanently based on the territory of Russia and a nucleus made up of the 98th division and the 31st assault brigade of the Russian airborne troops.

According to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, these forces should “be no worse than NATO” and would include mobile troops equipped with the most modern weaponry.

The rapid reaction contingent has 17,000 military personnel and 2,000 special personnel.

CSTO leaders also approved a statement in which they expressed their desire to collaborate with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and other international organizations, such as the Shanghai Security Organization, which groups together Russia, China and several Central Asian countries.

Two years later, the defensive organization equipped itself with a center for information security technologies and carried out the first maneuvers of the rapid reaction forces.

In 2012 Uzbekistan, which had joined in 2006, left the military alliance.

In September 2021, the CSTO forces were alerted to the situation in Afghanistan, which shares more than a thousand kilometers of border with one of its members, Tajikistan.

Putin said that the organization should be prepared to use its defensive potential in the face of the risks that arose after the withdrawal of the United States and its allies and the return of the Taliban regime.

On January 5, the Government of Kazakhstan requested help from the CSTO to put an end to the serious disturbances that had broken out a couple of days before and which it described as a “terrorist threat”.

Hours later, the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinián, who holds the rotating presidency of the military alliance, reported that the dispatch of a peace contingent had been authorized.