Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has said his country has frozen its membership in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as Yerevan continues to distance itself from Moscow amid a souring of bilateral relations, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reported.
Pashinian said in an interview with France 24 television channel on February 22 that the move comes after Moscow began several months ago to openly call on Armenian citizens to overthrow his government, and that the deluge of propaganda against him “has never stopped.”
The Pashinian government has long criticized the CSTO for its “failure to respond to the security challenges” facing Armenia.
Armenian authorities have accused Russian peacekeepers deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 of failing to stop Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive in September that ended with Baku regaining control over the breakaway region that for three decades was under ethnic Armenians’ control.
Moscow has rejected the accusations, arguing that its troops didn’t have a mandate to intervene and charging that Pashinian had effectively paved the way for the collapse of separatist rule in the region by previously acknowledging Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over it.
Still, Pashinian declined to attend a CSTO summit in Minsk in November and said in a televised Q&A session then that any decision about Yerevan’s continued membership in the grouping — which includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — would be based on Armenia’s “own state interests.”
When asked about the possible closure of Russia’s military base in the northwestern Armenian city of Gyumri, Pashinian said that “that issue is not on the agenda” at this point.
