Pashinyan refused to sign documents at the CSTO summit

The Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan at the Summit of the Organization of the Collective Security Treaty (CSTO) in Yerevan refused to sign the draft declarations of the CSTO collective security council and the document on joint measures to provide assistance to Armenia. This was reported by the press service of the government.

The CSTO includes Armenia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Belarus.

Speaking at the summit, Pashinyan called on the organization to give a political assessment of Azerbaijan’s actions against Armenia, which he considers aggression. According to him, the allies should seek from Azerbaijan the withdrawal of troops from the part of the territory of Armenia, otherwise "may mean the refusal of the CSTO of allied obligations." At the same time, Pashinyan emphasized that he did not ask for military assistance from the CSTO.

The Armenian authorities claim that as a result of armed clashes in September on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani military occupied part of the Armenian sovereign territory. In Baku, this is denied, indicating that the boundaries between countries are not demarized.

The Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko previously said that the Armenian side proposed amendments to the document that should be signed, but "we decided not to accept these two points, not to delve into them." The Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was present at the meeting, said that he was hoping for the conclusion of a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the results of the summit, said that there was no talk of the release of Armenia from the CSTO. According to Peskov, the leaders "not everything managed to agree on", and the "complexity of negotiations" was "due to the complexity of the moment we are all worried."

The Kremlin spokesman noted that Vladimir Putin informed his colleagues about the course of the so-called special operation in Ukraine, but did not give details. President of Kazakhstan Kasim-Zhomart Tokaev, speaking at the meeting, said that "the time has come for a joint collective search for the formula of the world" in Ukraine. According to him, "you need to use any chance to achieve at least a truce."