Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed the law suspending the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE).
"The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe of November 19, 1990, is suspended," said the law, which was passed by the upper house of the Belarusian parliament in early May, TASS reported.
In April, the head of state was permitted to bring to the House of Representatives a bill to suspend the country's participation in the CFE Treaty, which Minsk signed in 1992. According to the Belarusian authorities, the country has so far fulfilled its obligations in full.
CFE is a landmark arms control agreement after the end of the Cold War, signed on November 19, 1990, in Paris between the two military blocs - NATO and the now defunct Warsaw Pact.
It imposes restrictions on five key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe - tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, helicopters and fighter jets - and orders the destruction of surplus weapons. In 1999, an updated CFE treaty was drafted and approved in Istanbul, Turkey, which took into account new realities such as the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the enlargement of NATO. /BGNES
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