of the obligations Russia assumed during the 1999 Istanbul summit. However, there was no legal connection between the Adapted CFE treaty and the Russian withdrawal from Georgia and Moldova. The linkage between these two security issues was a decision made by NATO member states to protest against the Second Chechen War and was used as a reason not to ratify the treaty. Russia never accepted this decision—a decision also made six months after the Istanbul summit. Russia also considered the original CFE treaty to be outdated and strategically flawed as it did not take into account the dissolutions of the Warsaw Treaty or the Soviet Union. In Russia, even Vladimir Ryzhkov, an opposition leader and an independent member of the Duma, agreed that Russia had been forced to respond. However, he also speculated that Putin's suspension by decree was "primarily an election-year message to the country: "Your leader won't budge, no matter who formally becomes next President"." Reactions NATO immediately expressed regret over Russia's decision to suspend the treaty, describing it as "a step in the wrong direction", but hoped to engage Moscow in what was described as constructive talks on this issue. The United States along with European states such as Germany, Poland and Romania also expressed their disappointment. Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) General Secretary Nikolai Bordyuzha and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev expressed support for Putin's decree. On 25 November 2011, the UK stopped sharing military data with Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry also said that the consequences of the suspension would be the halting of inspections and verifications of its military sites by NATO countries and that it would no longer have the obligation to limit the number of its conventional weapons. In practice, Russia had already halted such verification visits in June 2007 after an extraordinary CFE treaty conference held in Vienna turned a deaf ear to Russia's complaints. Consequently, military delegations from Bulgaria and Hungary had been denied entry to Russian military units. Yuri Zarakhovich speculated in Time that the above-mentioned "immediate measures" would be a build-up of its forces in areas bordering NATO eastern members, in particular Poland and the Baltic states. Time further speculated at the time that other measures could include troop buildups along southern borders in the Caucasus, new pressures on Ukraine to maintain the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea beyond the (then planned) 2017 withdrawal deadline, and