US Withdrawal Casts Clouds Over Open Skies

Open Skies, signed in 2002, allows signatories to undertake unarmed reconnaissance flights at short notice over countries’ lands as a means of assessing troop formations and collecting information on bases. The treaty is designed to reassure ratifiers that adversaries are not preparing for war.

The US has complained that Russia was not in ‘full compliance’ of the treaty but said that it would reconsider the decision to withdraw if they did so. In a statement, the US State Department said that the ‘Russia alone’ was the cause of the country’s decision to withdraw from the treaty.

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