President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Mr Bordyuzha, we have the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) summit coming up on June 14. How are the preparations going?
Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation Nikolai Bordyuzha: The charter bodies have held several meetings in preparation for the summit. The agenda is quite big and covers practically all the different issues concerning military cooperation and foreign policy coordination, including our responses to threats and challenges.
Of course, the main subject of discussion will be the agreement on establishing the Collective Rapid Reaction Force (CRRF). A lot of work has been done since the extraordinary CSTO summit [on February 4, 2009], involving both studies and consultations. We have studied world experience in the area of putting together rapid reaction forces, and we have studied in close detail how such forces are used in practice and what rules apply. We have held more than 30 meetings at expert level, including at the level of deputy ministers and deputy secretaries of the security councils, and we have drafted a whole package of documents that we will submit to the presidents for examination.
The first of these documents is the agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Force. The second is the two appendices to the agreement. One of them concerns the command provisions, and the other the rules of engagement.
We are also ready to present to you for approval the composition of the military units that will make up the Collective Rapid Reaction Force. I can inform you that all of the countries have already presented their proposals. The kinds of units proposed are on the level of special forces brigades, paratroops brigades, in other words, all elite unites from the different member countries. We have also prepared a register of special forces. The register lists the security agencies’ and interior ministries’ special forces that can be engaged in counter-terrorist operations. These documents have all gone through the general approval procedures and are all in very large part ready.
We are also getting ready to brief the presidents on the next stage of work, because getting these documents on the collective force ready is just the first stage. Next will come a big package of documents regulating the decision-making procedures and agreement on the collective force’s legal status. This will concern the question of jurisdiction, procedures for crossing borders, and many other areas of the collective force’s activities.
Dmitry Medvedev: Some time has passed since the CSTO extraordinary summit took place, and I think these past months have shown that not only has the idea of establishing the Collective Rapid Reaction Force not lost its relevance, but it remains exceptionally important in our very complex and contradictory world, in which we still face all manner of regional threats in the form of terrorism, drug trafficking and much more. We will therefore continue our work. I am looking forward to seeing my colleagues at this summit of course. We will prepare the documents we need to give the collective force a legal base. As we agreed, and as I said at the end of our meeting, we need a force that is modern, mobile and active, and also compatible with similar forces in other organisations.
We will work on this.