Col. Gen. Nikolai Bordyuzha is secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance between six former Soviet states: Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday, he had some harsh words for Russia's NATO partners.
The North Atlantic Alliance, he said, has been consistently opposed to any military integration between Russia and its partners in the CSTO, and the reason is that NATO wants to deprive these countries of their collective security guarantees.
"Why do you think NATO does not cooperate with the CSTO?" the general asked. "It's simple – they have no need to support processes of [defense] integration. This way, things will be like in Syria, and nobody will be able to let out a peep. The country is being pounded, and there's no one to help them, since it didn't have any allies. And this is the situation they want to create for us as well," Bordyuzha said, referring to the members of the CSTO.
Ultimately, Bordyuzha suggested that the Western political, media and military effort's "most important task is to splinter our unity, to separate our nations into our own 'national apartments', and to dictate their terms to everyone individually."
In this scenario, the officer emphasized while that the CSTO has no absolutely no plans to fight a war of aggression against NATO, neither does it fear an attack by the Western alliance. "That's why the CSTO exists," Bordyuzha quipped.
Signatories to the alliance are not able to join other military alliances, and aggression against one member is considered aggression against all. The CSTO holds yearly command exercises and drills to improve coordination between its states militaries, the most recent being Cooperation-2016, which took place last month in Russia's Pskov region.
