Home » World » Russian lawmakers support withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty

Russian lawmakers support withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty

Russian The parliament’s lower house of parliament on Wednesday backed its withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty, an international agreement that allows observation flights over military installations.

Content will continue after the ad

Advertising

The withdrawal has yet to be supported by the upper house of parliament and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Moscow has indicated that it is ready to cancel the withdrawal process and return to the Open Skies Agreement if ASV will review the decision to withdraw from this Agreement.

Last May, then-US President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, accusing Moscow of violating the terms of the treaty.

The US withdrawal process was completed in November.

The Open Skies Agreement, signed in 1992, entered into force in 2002 and covered more than 30 member states in the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian area, including the United States and Russia. The aim of the agreement is to facilitate the exchange of information in order to increase trust and prevent the emergence of a new arms race.

The agreement provides for the possibility of conducting observation and photography flights over the territories of its member states in order to obtain information on their armed forces, military facilities and activities.

According to the idea of ​​a treaty, the more competing armies know about each other, the less likely they are to get into conflict with each other. But countries are also using these flights to explore the weaknesses of their opponents.

The parties to the agreement have carried out more than 1,500 observation flights since 2002.

Russia has denied any breach of the agreement.

Moscow claims that the restrictions it has imposed on observation flights were in line with the agreement and indicated that the United States has introduced even stricter restrictions on such flights over Alaska.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.