Earlier this month, six countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization—Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia—held exercises in southern Russia in which soldiers from each of the countries, as part of the organisation’s nascent ‘Rapid Reaction Force,’ cooperated to defeat a ‘terrorist’ threat.
Yet when brutal violence broke out in one of the CSTO member countries, Kyrgyzstan, just days later, the group didn’t respond rapidly at all. Kyrgyzstan’s interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, even asked Russia to intervene, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev responded that Russians would only do so under the auspices of the CSTO.
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