Azatutyun.am. Armenia will skip a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Tuesday one month after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian boycotted a summit of the leaders of ex-Soviet states making up the Russian-led military alliance.
Parliament speaker Alen Simonian confirmed his decision not to attend it when he spoke to reporters on Friday.
“Armenia’s sovereign territory was invaded by the armed forces of a third country, and the CSTO did not even give a political assessment of that. Why should we go there?” said Simonian.
The Armenian parliament’s press office said on Monday that other lawmakers will also not fly to Moscow for the session.
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Armenia officially requested military aid from its CSTO allies after Azerbaijan’s offensive military operations launched along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in September 2022. It has since repeatedly accused them of ignoring the request in breach of the CSTO’s statutes and declared mission.
Armenia’s boycott of high-level CSTO meetings held in recent months raised growing questions about its continued membership in the alliance. Simonian did not rule out the possibility of its exit.
The CSTO Parliamentary Assembly is due to discuss, among other things, the creation of a new joint air-defense system approved during the bloc’s November 22 summit in Minsk. Yerevan has still not clarified whether it will sign up to that agreement.
Pro-government members of the Armenian parliament committee on defense and security on Monday refused to comment on the issue. Another lawmaker from the ruling Civil Contract party, Vagharshak Hakobian, said Armenia should look into the new CSTO arrangement in a “very sober” manner.
“We are now in the process of very vigorously working on a peace treaty [with Azerbaijan,] but security guarantees are extremely important to us,” said Hakobian.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday suggested that Armenia is not planning to quit the CSTO and attributed Yerevan’s boycott of the organization to internal “processes” taking place in the country. By contrast, the Russian Foreign Ministry earlier accused Pashinian of systematically “destroying” Russian-Armenian relations.
