Referring to the Armenian Prime Minister’s statement about the freezing of Armenia’s membership in the CSTO, Kremlin spokesman Peskov told reporters that Putin had no discussions with Pashinyan in this regard and has no plans for such discussions in the near future.
But Peskov said that Moscow will continue the dialogue with Armenia in order to understand what Yerevan means and what will happen in the future. At the same time, the CSTO Secretariat reported that it did not receive any application from Yerevan regarding the working regime of Armenia within the organization. Basically, Pashinyan’s statement is political and has no legal basis.
In other words, Armenia has not taken any legal action to freeze or suspend its membership in the CSTO, but by political decision it has refused to participate in CSTO events, from exercises to assemblies and ministerial meetings, and does not appoint a new representative in the organization. After all that, the question arises, what is Yerevan waiting for in order to stop the CSTO membership? Is he waiting for the organization to change its behavior towards Armenia? Does Yerevan have such naivety?
Hardly: And maybe Yerevan is waiting to see how much the West will appreciate the decision to withdraw from the CSTO, whether it will “pay” for it as much as Nikol Pashinyan expects. At the same time, what is Pashinyan’s expectation? However, the whole issue is that the CSTO has perhaps become a “convertible value” for the Russian Federation as well, in the context of the logic of the currently unfolding geopolitical developments. I have had occasion to write and speak about it many times. At present, in the stage of major world order transformation, the Eurasian security system, the Eurasian security architecture is undergoing an inevitable transformation.
This also increases the probability of CSTO transformation in that system. Of course, it will depend on a number of related developments, the logic of Russia’s agreements with the major players in the region, but the realities are currently such that the probability of agreements that require transformation is considered quite high.
