Earlier this year, the Armenian government cancelled a CSTO military exercise planned in Armenia and refused to appoint a deputy secretary-general of the Russian-led military alliance over what it sees as a lack of CSTO support in the conflict with Azerbaijan. It also rejected a CSTO offer to deploy a monitoring mission to the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
The tensions have called into question Armenia’s continued membership in the organization. In a newspaper interview published over the weekend, the secretary of the country’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian, said Yerevan discussed the possibility of leaving the alliance. He gave no details.
Deputy Foreign Minister Mnatsakan Safarian suggested that the discussions took place shortly after Azerbaijan launched offensive military operations along the Armenian border last September.
An exit from the CSTO is “not on Armenia’s agenda now,” Safarian said, adding that Pashinian’s government may revisit the issue in the future.
“Yes, the situation is complicated, but being a CSTO member state and also having [membership] obligations, we continue to hope that our efforts will produce some results,” Safarian told reporters.
Grigorian complained last month that “the security mechanisms that were supposed to protect us are not working now.” “Armenia is trying to find new security guarantees,” he told Armenian Public Television.
Safarian would not say whether the authorities in Yerevan see any realistic alternative to Armenia’s membership in the CSTO and bilateral military ties with Russia.
Armen Rustamian, a leading member of the main opposition Hayastan alliance, believes that in the absence of such an alternative Armenia’s estrangement from the alliance of six ex-Soviet states carries serious national security risks.
“Without having a new security system they are trying to wreck the existing one,” Rustamian charged.
“Leave the CSTO and explain why you did that, or stay in the CSTO and use all, even minimal chances of getting the CSTO to address our security problems,” he said, appealing to Pashinian’s administration. “We are becoming an unreliable partner, and that is adding to threats and dangers facing increasingly facing our country.”
Pashinian claimed in March that it is the CSTO that could “leave Armenia.” The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, laughed off that remark, saying that she has trouble understanding its meaning. A senior Russian diplomat afterwards called for an end to the “harmful” spat.
