Vladimir Putin: “Many years of work to build a comprehensive security system of the CSTO Member States is yielding results”

“Crucially, our Organization and its secretariat have been able to take all the necessary decisions in a swift and well-coordinated manner. In fact, we had very little time and had to act in a matter of hours to prevent the foundations of state authority in Kazakhstan from being undermined, and the situation inside the country from deteriorating, as well as to stop terrorists, criminals, looters and other criminal elements,” noted Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, in his speech at an extraordinary meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Treaty Organization Collective Security Council on January 10, 2022.
The President of the Russian Federation stressed, “Our Organization has demonstrated its potential and the ability to take swift, decisive and effective action. Each of our allies contributed to fulfilling this mission within the CSTO forces: they include units from all Member States without exception that are already there and are proactively carrying out their mission.”
According to Vladimir Putin, all this is evidence that the painstaking work conducted within the CSTO framework “to establish an integral security system for member states, including, of course, the CSTO Collective Peacekeeping Forces – this work is producing results.”
The President of the Russian Federation stressed the importance of training the CSTO Member States’ service personnel under common programmes and the fact that the armed forces of the CSTO Member States “issued standard or compatible weapons, equipment and communications systems.”
Speaking about the training of the CSTO peacekeeping contingent, the President of the Russian Federation recalled that “we streamlined the deployment of peacekeepers during joint regular exercises. This was done for example during the CSTO’s recent Unbreakable Brotherhood exercise, organized with due account of Russian service personnel’s combat experience in Syria.”
“It was precisely these purposeful joint combat training activities of the CSTO States’ forces that made it possible to promptly deploy peacekeepers to Kazakhstan and to ensure their most effective performance,” noted Vladimir Putin.