The Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty at a Glance

October 2007
Press Contact: Wade Boese, Research Director, (202) 463-8270 x104

Nine years to the day after signature of the original Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the 30 CFE states-parties[1] signed an adaptation agreement on November 19, 1999, that updates the Cold War-era treaty’s structure. The agreement jettisons the bloc-to-bloc and zonal limits of the original treaty and replaces them with a system of national and territorial ceilings. (For more information on the original CFE Treaty, see the Association’s The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) Treaty at a Glance fact sheet.)

The Adapted Treaty will enter into force when all 30 states-parties have ratified the agreement. However, the United States and its fellow 21 NATO members that are CFE states-parties have said that they will not ratify the treaty until Russia first complies with its new weapons limits and with the commitments Moscow made in the CFE Final Act and the November 1999 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Istanbul Summit Declaration. The act and declaration—political, not legally binding, documents concluded with the adapted treaty—set out additional commitments by CFE states-parties on future weapons deployments, including pledges by Russia to withdraw its treaty-limited weapons and military forces from Georgia and Moldova.

Early in 2002, Moscow declared that it had met the adapted treaty’s weapons limits. NATO accepted the claim in July 2002 but repeated that Russia must still fulfill its commitments with regard to Georgia and Moldova before ratification. Only Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine have ratified the adapted treaty. Hence, the original treaty remains in effect. Moscow is urging NATO members to speed up ratification efforts because the Kremlin is unhappy that four NATO members (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia) are not party to the original treaty and therefore have no arms limits. No provision exists for the four countries to accede to the original treaty. They must wait to join the adapted treaty once it enters into force.

National Ceilings

Each country will have a specific limit on tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs), heavy artillery, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters—collectively referred to as treaty-limited equipment (TLE)—that it can deploy in the treaty’s area of application, which covers the area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains.

Territorial Ceilings

Each country with territory in the treaty’s area of application will have a cap on the total number of tanks, ACVs, and heavy artillery that can be deployed within its borders. This restricts national and foreign-stationed TLE. During the adaptation negotiations, NATO refused Russia’s persistent efforts for similar caps on combat aircraft and attack helicopters.

Most countries, including Russia and the three newest NATO members, agreed to set territorial ceilings equal to national ceilings, in effect requiring a state’s own TLE on its territory to be lower than its national ceilings if that state wanted to host foreign-stationed forces. A host country must give advance
consent for any foreign TLE deployments.

Both Russia and Ukraine will have subceilings establishing areas in which their ground TLE deployments on their own territories will be limited within their overall limits.

Temporary Deployments

A country’s territorial ceilings can be exceeded by 153 tanks, 241 ACVs, and 140 artillery for military exercises and temporary deployments. In “exceptional circumstances,” countries outside the original treaty’s flank zone, which limited ground TLE in the northern and southern flanks of Europe, can temporarily exceed their territorial ceilings by 459 tanks, 723 ACVs, and 420 artillery. Temporary is not defined, but regular notifications are required for TLE exceeding territorial ceilings.

Transparency

States-parties will be required to permit inspections of 20 percent of their “objects of verification,” which are military units down to the regiment level and storage, repair, and reduction sites with TLE present.

ENDNOTE

1. CFE states-parties: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.