Kyrgyz Cancellation of CSTO Military Exercise Spells Trouble for Central Asian Security Architecture

Kyrgyzstan’s government announced on October 9 that it would cancel the Central Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) joint military exercise “Invincible Brotherhood,” originally set to take place on its territory beginning Monday, October 10, according to AP News. The Central Security Treaty Organization is a collective security organization founded in 2002 and encompasses Russia, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus. The Diplomat reported that while a recent violent border incident with Tajikistan, a fellow CSTO member, appears to be the immediate cause for Bishkek’s abrupt decision, it may point to a more general fraying along the edges of the Russian-dominated security architecture of Central Asia.

In a subsequent explanation of the government’s decision, Kyrgyzstan's deputy prime minister explicitly linked it to events of mid-September when, after two Kyrgyz soldiers were killed by heavy Tajik shelling, Tajikistan escalated its attack to target civilian housing and infrastructure on the border, as reported by The Diplomat. This attack killed at least 59 Kyrgyz civilians, injured hundreds, and forced around 140.000 more to flee their homes. Kyrgyzstan’s armed forces responded in kind, killing around 40 and injuring dozens (though it remains unclear how many among them were civilians). Though some sources, including the Russian news agency TASS, described the events as a “border skirmish,” the sheer scale of the shelling points to premeditated aggression from Tajikistan with the goal of resolving a number of border disputes in its favor.

According to Reuters, the CSTO’s lack of arbitration in the conflict and what Kyrgyz officials believe to be a failure on the side of Russia to properly provide security is perhaps what also led the Kyrgyz President Sadyr Jasparov to refuse to attend the October 7 gathering of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders on the occasion of Vladimir Putin’s birthday, as reported by The Diplomat. Furthermore, Kyrgyz leaders likely took Putin’s decision to award the Tajik President, Emomali Rhamon, the “Order of Merit for the Fatherland” in early October to indicate that Russia favored Tajik over Kyrgyz interests, Intellinews found.

This incident fits within a larger pattern of recent tensions within the CSTO: Armenia refused to participate in an earlier set of military exercises in Kazakhstan in 2022 after Russia failed to fulfill its self-proclaimed role of security provider and arbiter in the conflict with Azerbaijan. More recently, in an interaction that has gone viral, the Tajik President publicly scolded Vladimir Putin for supposedly excluding Central Asia from its economic and security considerations. 

Interestingly, the CSTO’s current situation presents itself as an extreme contrast to the beginning of 2022, when, according to Eurasianet, a CSTO coalition led by Russia quickly intervened in member state Kazakhstan and quashed local uprisings. At this point, according to Utrikespolitiska Institutet, the CSTO appeared, in many Western analysts’ eyes, to be a reliable new security architecture for the region under Russian hegemony. Undoubtedly, many of the problems that have accrued in the CSTO since are due not in a small part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting decline in Russian state capacity. While analysts like Thomas van Linge now seem tempted to pronounce the CSTO’s coming demise, the benefits that the coalition provides to its member states––not least of which is the potential for regional stability––are still considerable, so its future remains largely contingent on how its most powerful member fares in Ukraine.