Central Asia Policy Brief No. 26, May 2015
By Marcel de Haas
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is a Russian-led military alliance, the other member states of which are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a CIS Collective Security Treaty (CST) was signed in Tashkent in May 1992. The treaty reaffirmed the desire of all participating states to abstain from the use or threat of force against one another. Furthermore, in its Article 1, the treaty forbids parties from joining other military alliances. Similar to NATO, the CSTO has a military assistance provision (Article 4), which states that aggression against one party will be considered an attack on all parties.
