ABSTRACT
Russia first enunciated its concerns about co-operative maritime security in the Far East in Mikhail Gorbachev's Vladivostok speech of 1986. Gorbachev called for the containment of certain categories of naval operations in the Northwest Pacific, the establishment of maritime confidence-building measures (MCBMs) to reduce the threat of accidental war, and the enhancement of the security of sea lines of communications (SLOCs) vital to its trade. This proposal could be realised through arms-reduction measures on the Sino-Russian borders, by introducing bilateral confidence-building measures (CBMs), which would allow the Russian Navy to continue to reduce while minimising the impact of this reduction on Russia's strategic place in the region. The collapse of the Soviet Union, furthermore, changed the wider maritime strategic environment and geo-political structure of Northeast Asia. As Russia's current strategic status in the region will deteriorate further, its long-term maritime security objective is to create a multilateral regional security
system that would allow it to remain involved in regional security at low cost.4 Today, Russia is much concerned over maritime security in the region, and willingly signed incidents-at-sea agreements with South Korea and Japan in 1993.
