MOSCOW TO VIOLATE ANOTHER ARMS CONTROL DEADLINE.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s international cooperation section chief, Col.-General Dmitry Kharchenko, has announced that Russia will fail to meet a 31 December deadline for scrapping military hardware beyond the Ural mountains under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty. Claiming that Russia did not have enough money to eliminate the arms, Kkarchenko proposed extending the deadline until the end of 1998. He said the equipment to be eliminated beyond the Urals included 6,000 tanks, 1,500 armored vehicles, and 7,000 artillery systems. Of these, only 1,141 tanks, 608 armored vehicles and 2,709 artillery systems had been destroyed so far, he said. (6)

Moscow agreed to destroy the weapons under a compromise accepted on June 14, 1991, which cleared the way to ratification of the CFE treaty. The fate of the treaty had been in doubt because Moscow had suddenly moved some of its military equipment beyond the Urals and out of the scope of the treaty. But under the compromise, Moscow agreed to include the weapons beyond the Urals in the treaty’s overall limits.

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