Mikhail Galuzin, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, referred to the relations between Armenia and CSTO in an interview with RTVi.
In an interview with Lente.ru, you said: "We regard the CSTO as a living organism, dynamically developing and adapting flexibly to the modern situation". At the same time, later, on March 14, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed concern that "the CSTO is leaving Armenia." “In 2022, the President (Secretary General) of the CSTO told me that there are fears in the CSTO that Armenia will leave the organization. I answered that these fears are baseless, but other fears exist in Armenia, and they concern the fact that the CSTO will leave Armenia. And my assessment is that, willingly or unwillingly, the CSTO is leaving Armenia, and this worries us”, he said (quoted by TASS). How would you comment on this statement? What difficulties within the framework of the CSTO mechanism would you single out?
We have commented on this topic before. We hope that the harmful discussions on the topic “who leaves from what” will stop, and all issues of interaction with Yerevan within the framework of the CSTO, including the deployment of the Organization’s observation mission on the territory of Armenia, will be resolved in a constructive and mutually beneficially manner. We openly discuss all the concerns of the Armenian side within the framework of interaction formats existing in the CSTO - from meetings of the Permanent Council to the Collective Security Council, which is the highest body of the Organization. For our part, we reaffirm our readiness to implement plans to deploy a CSTO mission on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in the interests of ensuring the security of Armenia, as well as other assistance measures laid down in the relevant draft decision of the CSTO Collective Security Council on rendering assistance to Armenia. We are ready for this work exactly to the same extent as Armenia is.
As for, as you say, "difficulties" within the CSTO, there is no single international structure that does real practical work in the interests of all its members can do without them. To date, the Organization has launched an intensive process of implementing the decisions taken at the meetings of the leaders of its countries held in 2022. Largely thanks to Armenia's chairmanship, a lot has been done to build up the CSTO's capabilities to repel challenges and threats to our collective security. I would like to emphasize that the results achieved would not have been possible without the coordinated, resultful and interested work of all Member States.
Now active preparations are underway for the regular meetings of the councils of the foreign ministers and defense ministers, the committee of secretaries of the CSTO security councils, scheduled for May-June. The agenda is very rich, which indicates the high demand for the Organization in addressing issues of ensuring security and stability in the zone of its responsibility. These and other issues of strengthening cooperation within the CSTO were the subject of keen discussion during the meeting of Ministers Sergey Lavrov and Ararat Mirzoyan on March 20, 2023 in Moscow, as well as the recent visit of CSTO Secretary General Imangali Tasmagambetov to Yerevan.
