Russia called on Monday for a new European-Atlantic security treaty embracing all countries and security organizations including NATO, the EU and post-Soviet bodies that would restore strategic parity.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the parity, which has long been the basis of strategic stability across the Atlantic, is becoming unbalanced because NATO has eclipsed the Cold War collective security system that has become dominated by the US.
Lavrov said in a speech on Saturday to the UN General Assembly that work on the new treaty could be started at a pan-European summit and include governments and organizations in the region.
He referred to it as “a kind of Helsinki-2,” a follow-up to the 1975 Helsinki Treaty.
That treaty between all European nations, together with the US and Canada, evolved into the present-day Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the largest conflict-prevention and security organization on the continent.
Elaborating on the proposal, first put forward in June by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Lavrov told a news conference that the OSCE principles, especially “the need to avoid any means to strengthen your own security at the expense of the security of others,” are no longer being followed.
He cited several examples of “strategic stability being strained” including Washington’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the US decision to install anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic and the establishment of US bases in Bulgaria and Romania.
Lavrov said that “negotiations [for a strategic arms limitation treaty] are not so far heading anywhere because our US colleagues do not want to keep limits on the delivery vehicles and on nuclear warheads at storage. They only want to keep some limits on the operationally deployed nuclear warheads.”
EU MONITORS
Meanwhile, EU ceasefire monitors will for now not operate inside a security zone south of Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia region but talks on access are continuing, Russia’s military said yesterday.
“From tomorrow, representatives of the European Union will begin conducting monitoring up to the southern borders of the security zone,” Vitaly Manushko, head of the temporary press center for the Russian peacekeeping force around South Ossetia, told reporters.
Under a French-brokered ceasefire deal, Russian troops stationed in Georgia since a brief war in August are to pull back from undisputed Georgian territory by Oct. 10, and allow EU monitors to take over duties patrolling the security zone.
Manushko said Russian and EU officials, meeting in the Georgian village of Karaleti yesterday, had not finalized a technical and logistical agreement that would have allowed the EU monitors to enter the security zone from today.
SUICIDE BOMB
In related news, a suicide car bomber blew himself up yesterday in Russia’s southern republic of Ingushetia in an apparent attempt to kill the region’s Interior Minister, police said.
Three bystanders and a motorist were wounded in the region’s main city of Nazran when the bomber blew up his Lada saloon as Interior Minister Mussa Medov and his bodyguards pulled alongside in their armored Mercedes, police said.
Medov and his bodyguards were not hurt, although their vehicle was severely damaged and a 2m crater was left in the road surface.
“It’s difficult right now to determine the comparative force of the explosion, but I’m certain it was no less than 2kg of explosive material,” an investigator at the blast site said.
Ingushetia is a poor, chiefly Muslim republic in a turbulent North Caucasus region where Moscow is struggling to contain an insurgency by Islamist militants who kill officials in ambushes and bombings.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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