Russia and other ex-Soviet republics making up the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) are committed to jointly defending Armenia against foreign aggression, the Russian-led security bloc’s top military commander said over the weekend.
Colonel-General Anatoly Sidorov, head of the CSTO joint chiefs of staff, stressed at the same time that such military intervention would have to be approved by all member states.
“The armed forces of the organization are tasked with protecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of CSTO member states,” Sidorov told a news conference in Yerevan. “This happens at the request of the leadership of a particular member state and the decision is made by the Collective Security Council.”
“I’m not going to tell you about our red lines now,” he said. “I can only tell you that if, God forbid, one of our states needs real assistance then our collective forces … will be ready to come and help accomplish tasks set in the [CSTO] statutes and decisions of the Collective Security Council. I think that the Republic of Armenia must have no doubts about that.”
Sidorov specifically referred to a possible dispatch to Armenia of troops from the CSTO’s joint rapid-reaction force which was set up by Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in 2009. In his words, the Collective Operational Reaction Forces (CORF) currently number over 20,000 soldiers, most of them army commandos.
Armenia - Kazakh special forces take part in a Collective Security Treaty Organization exercise at the Marshal Bagramian Training Center, 7Oct2017.
The Russian general spoke to reporters as about 1,000 reconnaissance troops from the six CSTO member states concluded a two-day exercise at the Armenian army’s Marshal Bagramian Training Center about 50 kilometers west of Yerevan. A larger number of CORF soldiers as well as Armenian army units and Russian troops stationed in Armenia began joint wargames there on Monday.
The CSTO’s Central Asian member states, notably Kazakhstan, have warm ties with Azerbaijan have repeatedly signed pro-Azerbaijani multilateral declarations on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, prompting strong criticism from Armenia. Kazakhstan also forced the cancellation of a planned summit of the Eurasian Economic Union in Yerevan in the immediate aftermath of the April 2016 fighting in Karabakh. The move was widely construed as a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan.