Arctic Yearbook 2014 | Page 447

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