Russia has formally withdrawn from long-standing military cooperation agreements with Portugal, France and Canada, in a move that underscores the Kremlin’s deepening estrangement from the West after nearly four years of full-scale war in Ukraine.
The decrees, published on Friday and reported by Russian state media, void pacts signed between 1989 and 2000—agreements forged during a period of unprecedented optimism in Russia-Western relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, Moscow sought closer ties with NATO members, and leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin pursued an agenda of strategic integration and security cooperation.
The earliest of the agreements, with Canada, was concluded weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Soviet leadership attempted to stabilise relations with Western capitals. The accord with France, signed in 1994, reflected Moscow’s hopes of embedding itself within Europe’s security architecture, including talks on crisis consultations and broader political cooperation. Portugal’s agreement in 2000 came during what researchers describe as the high-water mark of bilateral engagement, despite Lisbon’s firm position within NATO.
Those ambitions have long since evaporated. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance towards NATO, accusing the alliance—without evidence—of fuelling tensions and provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow’s objections to Ukraine’s future NATO membership were among the central demands in a leaked US–Russian draft proposal to end the conflict, prompting warnings from Kyiv and analysts that the framework risked paving the way for future aggression.
Friday’s move mirrors a similar step in July, when Russia cancelled a 1996 military-technical agreement with Germany, accusing Berlin of pursuing a “hostile” and “militaristic” posture. The latest terminations come as EU member states debate how to deploy nearly €210 billion in frozen Russian state assets, most held at Euroclear in Belgium, to support Ukraine’s financing gap. Portugal and France are among the governments backing proposals to leverage the funds for loans to Kyiv.
Ukraine faces a projected budget shortfall of about $65 billion over the next two years, according to the IMF, and continues to rely heavily on Western military and economic support as the conflict grinds on.
