In his final Address to the Federal Assembly on the state of the nation, President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to declare a Russian moratorium on implementing the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

That decision created another storm of criticism by Western politicians and pundits and official expressions of “concern” from NATO’s Secretary General and the allied governments.

The criticism is misplaced. Putin has finally said what everybody wanted to say about the CFE Treaty but were too politically correct to do so.

The treaty has outlived its usefulness. It is nothing but a relic of the Cold War. It is no longer needed to provide for security in Europe. Today a war in Europe between Russia and NATO is unimaginable. If the treaty simply ceased to exist, the world would hardly notice it. But as a relic of the Cold War, it continues to do harm to Russia’s relations with the West.

The treaty artificially perpetuates the Cold War divisions in Europe and pits Russia against the entire NATO alliance at the time when Russia and NATO are no longer adversaries. It imposes stringent compliance requirements that limit Russia’s ability to respond quickly to real security challenges, and more importantly, it has not been implemented by Western nations since the signing of its adapted version in 1999, while Russia has unilaterally been fulfilling its obligations.

The CFE Treaty was signed in 1990 between 16 NATO member-states and six countries of the Warsaw Pact. The treaty imposed strict limits on the number of heavy military equipment (or TLE in the legalese) the parties were allowed to have in four regional zones. Each zone was allowed no more than 20,000 tanks, 30,000 combat vehicles, 20,000 artillery pieces, 6,800 combat aircraft and 2,000 combat helicopters. The treaty did not affect U.S. forces in North America or Russian forces in the Far East.

Additionally, there were even stricter limits imposed on Russian troop deployments in the two flank zones ? the Leningrad Military Diistrict and the South Caucasus Military District. In practice, this meant that Russia could not move around its military forces on its own territory without notifications and agreement from NATO. During the war in Chechnya, Russia could not move reinforcements to the war zone because of the CFE flank limits.

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact immediately made the CFE Treaty limits on combat equipment meaningless. Since the treaty went into force in 1992, NATO has grown to 26 states with many former Warsaw Pact nations becoming new NATO members. Both Russia and NATO rapidly decreased their TLE holdings far below the treaty limits. Who would need 20,000 tanks in Europe now?

To adapt the treaty to this new reality, in 1999 the parties signed a new version - the Adapted CFE Treaty, which imposed new limits for military hardware for individual states, not military blocks, and significantly increased Russia’s allowed TLE holdings in the flank zones.

But of the 30 states that signed the new version of the treaty, only Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan ratified it. NATO members refused to ratify it before Russia implemented the so-called Istanbul agreements, which called on Russia to withdraw its forces from Georgia and Moldova. Russia has withdrawn all of its forces from Georgia, while in Moldova it maintains a small peacekeeping force and a garrison that guards and operates a huge ammunition depot that remained in Moldova after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Europe.

In short, NATO used the Istanbul Agreements, which have nothing to do with the CFE Treaty, as a pretext to avoid implementing the Adapted Treaty. Moreover, four new NATO members ? Slovenia, Latvia, Esstonia and Lithuania ? have refused to join the new CFE Treaty despite NAATO’s public commitment that they would do so.

The treaty has not been working and has served only as a tool to limit Russia’s freedom to provide for its own security while imposing no similar restrains on NATO.

This is a situation that no sovereign state would tolerate, and this is exactly what Putin said. His decision to impose a moratorium on CFE Treaty implementation had less to do with European security and much more to do with Russia demanding fair treatment and defending its sovereignty. Russia does not want to be singled out unfairly and fulfill obligations that other nations do not want to undertake.

The United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2001. The Bush administration called the ABM Treaty a relic of the Cold War and insisted it was no longer needed because Russia and the United States were no longer enemies. Now Washington plans to deploy ABM interceptors in Poland and an ABM radar in the Czech Republic and says Russia has nothing to fear from this move.

Fine. But if we are no longer enemies, then why the fuss about the CFE Treaty? Russia has not withdrawn from it, just said it would not implement its provisions until the rest of the signatory nations ratified it. This is fair ? in business, private companies are not requuired to fulfill contract obligations if other contract parties openly flaunt them.

With this decision on the CFE Treaty, Vladimir Putin has sent a simple message to the West: Russia does not view the West as a military adversary, Russia is a normal country that demands equal treatment and Russia wants due respect for the role it played in ending the Cold War.

Russia did not lose the Cold War, as some in the West would like to believe. It helped end it, and the CFE Treaty was part of that process. But the Cold War has long been over and it is time to move on. If this means getting rid of relics like the CFE Treaty, so be it.