Russia has terminated long-standing military cooperation agreements with Portugal, France, and Canada through a decree published on Friday, according to Russian state media.
Russian authorities said the three agreements, signed between 1989 and 2000, are no longer strategically relevant.
These agreements were concluded during a period of improving relations between Russia and the West after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The agreement with Canada was signed just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—an event that effectively signaled the end of the Cold War—as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sought to strengthen ties with Western countries. The 1994 agreement with France followed President Boris Yeltsin’s broader efforts to integrate Russia into European security structures.
The agreement with Portugal, signed in 2000, came during what researchers describe as the most productive period of Russia–Portugal relations in the 1990s and 2000s, Euronews.al reports.
Since then, the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin have adopted an increasingly hostile stance toward NATO and the West, claiming they are deliberately encroaching on Russia and partially blaming the West for Moscow’s full-scale war in Ukraine.
Russia’s opposition to Ukraine’s potential NATO membership was one of its core demands in a 28-point proposal for a U.S.–Russia agreement to end the war.
Friday’s decision follows a similar move in July, when Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin canceled a 1996 military-technical cooperation agreement with Germany. The Foreign Ministry accused Berlin of pursuing an “openly hostile policy” and “increasingly aggressive militaristic ambitions.”
Portugal and France both support European Commission proposals to use frozen Russian assets to provide loans for Ukraine. Around €210 billion in Russian state assets are currently frozen in the European Union, most of them held by Euroclear in Belgium.
The EU is discussing ways to use these blocked funds to help Ukraine, which faces a budget deficit of around $65 billion over the next two years, according to the International Monetary Fund.
