Armenia said on Wednesday that it is still discussing with Russia and other ex-Soviet allies the thorny issue of who should replace Yuri Khachaturov, a retired Armenian army general, as head of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
The new Armenian government moved to replace Khachaturov in July after he was charged in connection with the 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan.
The Russian Foreign Ministry denounced Khachaturov prosecution as politically motivated and said Yerevan must formally “recall” him before trying to name his replacement. A Kremlin official told Russian media that the Armenian authorities’ decision dealt a “colossal blow to the image of the whole organization.”
Russia and two other CSTO member states, Kazakhstan and Belarus, are reportedly reluctant to agree to the appointment of another Armenian as secretary general of the Russian-led defense bloc. The issue will be high on the agenda of the next CSTO summit expected later this year.
“Consultations with relevant CSTO bodies are still going on,” said Anna Naghdalian, the spokeswoman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry. “The consultations are aimed at finding consensus-based solutions within the framework of the CSTO statutes as well as clarifying those statutes.”
Naghdalian argued that the statues do not set explicit rules for changing CSTO secretary generals.
“The results of the consultations will be made public when they are submitted to the [CSTO’s decision-making] Collective Security Council for approval,” she told a news conference.
The CSTO member states agreed in 2015 that their representatives will take turns to run the organization on a rotating basis. They appointed Khachaturov as secretary general in April 2017 after almost two years of delay reportedly resulting from Kazakhstan’s and Belarus’s reluctance to have an Armenian hold the position because of their warm ties with Azerbaijan.
Facebook Forum