What the speech does establish is a rhetorical alignment: information interference, proxy conflict and unregulated military artificial intelligence are presented as a single continuum of threat.
The secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Taalatbek Masadykov, has said the West is making active use of information and communication technologies and proxy war methods in geopolitical rivalry. Speaking at an international collective security forum in Moscow, according to TASS, Masadykov argued that such technologies are being deployed to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
His remarks place two developments side by side. The first is the familiar charge of external meddling through digital channels. The second is the claim that proxy war methods are now being supplemented by what he called traditional and new security challenges and threats. The CSTO, a Moscow-centred alliance of several post-Soviet states, has long framed its mission around collective defence, and its chief's intervention casts the contest with the West in terms of methods rather than theatres.
The sharper part of Masadykov's argument concerned weapons. He said a new arms race has embraced the use of artificial intelligence in the military field, including in lethal autonomous systems. The legal vacuum in this sphere, and the absence of any international legal instruments regulating the use of such systems, he said, are fraught with the danger of the expansion of conflict situations.
He added that a special danger is posed by the potential access that international terrorist organisations and transnational criminal groups might gain to the latest technologies. That concern is not unique to the CSTO: the prospect of autonomous systems proliferating beyond state control has been raised in other capitals and in multilateral forums. What Masadykov's remarks signal is that Moscow's security bloc intends to press the governance question as part of its wider critique of Western conduct.
The report does not specify which states or incidents Masadykov had in mind, nor whether the CSTO has proposed any concrete instrument, draft treaty or negotiating forum for regulating autonomous weapons. It also does not indicate how the organisation's members would define lethal autonomy in practice, a definitional dispute that has slowed discussions elsewhere. Those gaps matter, because a legal vacuum is easier to describe than to fill.
What the speech does establish is a rhetorical alignment: information interference, proxy conflict and unregulated military artificial intelligence are presented as a single continuum of threat. Whether that framing gains traction beyond the CSTO's membership is not yet known. For now, the organisation's chief has put the absence of rules at the centre of his case, and invited others to answer for it.
