🇺🇦🇷🇺Ukraine vs Russia

An Anniversary That Should Serve as Warning for Russia’s Allies

The Warsaw Pact was created 71 years ago, on May 14 . After the collapse of the Soviet Union it dissolved and many of those countries are now in NATO. More recently, Moscow tried to form an Asian Version of the Warsaw pact, Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also proved to be fragile. No

Kyiv Post

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2026年5月14日

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May 14 occupies a symbolic place in Russia’s military imagination. It marks the anniversary of the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 and, nearly half a century later, the founding of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in 2002.

The irony is difficult to miss: As the Kremlin works relentlessly to portray NATO as divided and hollow, Russia’s own security alliance system is showing signs of decay and it has become a symbol of Russia’s declining influence.

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The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites signed the Warsaw Pact creating a formal counterweight to NATO. The Pact formally dissolved in 1991, but the strategic mindset behind it did not disappear. While presented as a system of collective defense, it functioned for many Eastern European states as an instrument of Soviet control rather than genuine partnership. The invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 laid bare the limits of sovereignty when Kremlin interests were at stake.

The Warsaw Pact may be gone, but Russia’s buffer zones and spheres of influence continue to shape Putin’s foreign policy today.

The CSTO was built as a Russian-led security framework originating in the Collective Security Treaty of 1992. Yet its limits are increasingly growing. Member states are openly questioning Moscow’s reliability as a partner.

Armenia has experienced Russia’s “friendship” first-hand. Despite being a founding member, its ties with Russia and the CSTO eroded after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, when appeals for support went unanswered and the alliance failed to intervene. When Azerbaijan completed its takeover in 2023, Russian peacekeepers stood by, reinforcing the perception that CSTO commitments follow Russian interests. Then in 2024, Armenia froze its CSTO membership. Armenia is now moving closer to the European Union, prompting Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova to warn that this would lead to “irreversible involvement in Brussels’ anti-Russian line,” with political and economic consequences for Armenia.

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Russia’s failure to protect Armenia is just one of many recent examples. Putin sells Russia as the anti-Western power that never abandons its friends. But from Armenia to Syria, from Venezuela to Iran, or in Hungary, where Russia could not save its ally Orban, the Kremlin’s alliances increasingly look like arrangements with expiry dates. Moscow demands loyalty and anti-Western solidarity, yet repeatedly proves unable or unwilling to fully protect its partners when crises hit.

However, the Kremlin’s priority has always been regime preservation and internal stability. The Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to contain dissent in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Similarly, in 2022, the CSTO deployed forces to Kazakhstan to help the government quell widespread unrest, underscoring how Russia-led security structures continue to be used in moments of internal instability.

Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Alexey Shevtsov has accused the West of “supporting existing and provoking new military conflicts and economic cataclysms,” including around CSTO states. There is a recurring logic between Soviet-era NATO paranoia and Russia today: efforts to counter NATO have repeatedly strengthened it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact reshaped Europe’s security order, paving the way for NATO enlargement and deeper Western integration in the decades that followed. That pattern has returned: Russia’s war in Ukraine has revived NATO cohesion, culminating in Finland and Sweden joining the alliance.

Russia assumed CSTO chairmanship in January under the motto “Collective Security in a Multipolar World: Common Goal, Shared Responsibility,” an irony given doubts over Moscow’s reliability as a partner. The CSTO increasingly shows that Russian interests come first and that Putin’s allies cannot rely on Moscow when it matters most. On May 26, the Committee of CSTO Security Council Secretaries will meet in Moscow, chaired by Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu. The West should remind Moscow’s allies of the lesson: with friends like Putin, they hardly need enemies.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.