Arctic Yearbook 2014
447
Concluding Remarks
In the light of major budget cuts and modern equipment, the strong role of conventional arms
control is often seen as a relic from the times of the Cold War (Schmidt 2013: 4 ff.). Letting its role
further diminish would be a severe mistake, due to its important contribution to create structural
conditions for the prevention of interstate armed conflicts (ibid.: 6). The recent crisis in Ukraine in
which measures of CSBMs have been used intensively in order to diminish the escalatory
developments (OSCE, 2014), seem to confirm the strong and important role of existing regimes of
conventional arms control and CSBMs and let them appear more important than ever. The Arctic
region, as an area of generally good co-operation and trust among its states, c