The document notes that at the session of the Collective Security Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Moscow on June 14 the Uzbek delegation did not sign the Agreement on setting up the CRRF, believing that it should reflect some “stands of principle”.

One of them is that the military component of the CSTO, the collective rapid reaction forces (CRRF), “should be meant expressly for repulsing eternal threats and challenges to security of member states, and the mechanism of decision-making on their use should be based on unswerving observance of the principle of consensus.” Uzbekistan proceeds from the view that every participating country of the CSTO can resolves its internal contradictions and stand-offs by its own forces, without drawing on armed forces from the outside.

The press release also stresses that “the CRRF should not be used as an instrument for settling any disputed matters in the framework of the CSTO and on the entire space of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). There exists a number of frozen conflicts on the Commonwealth territory, so Uzbekistan declares for precluding even a hypothetic possibility of the CRRF being used for their settlement and insists that this aspect should be reflected in the Agreement on the CRRF.”

Then the Uzbek side holds that “sending contingents to the territory of another state and making the decision on bringing into its own territory military contingents of other states of the CSTO dispatched to the CRRF is possible only if this does not contradict national legislation of the participating states.”

Uzbekistan’s stand on the very Agreement on the CRRF is that “just as any interstate document it cannot and must not temporarily go into effect immediately upon its signing.” “In such case there is no sense in its ratification, and the opinion of parliaments of the CSTO member states is fully ignored,” the press release notes.