Armenia doesn’t plan to reformat its allied relationship with Russia, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan has said.
A Russian state television reporter asked FM Mirzoyan during his press conference with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov whether Armenia was seeking new strategic partners, for example in Europe, given his previous statement about the ineffectiveness of the existing security architecture.
Mirzoyan said his previous statement pertained to the overall global security architecture that existed for many decades.
“But of course I was also speaking about us. We’ve seen from our own bad experience that this architecture doesn’t work, we were forced to try to reform or perfect that security system, and this process is continuous. Regarding the question whether we are planning to reformat our allied relations with Russia, I’d like to give a very direct answer, no. Our obligations, rights and intentions against each other are clearly written, signed and ratified on paper, and no one has dissolved it. At the same time, the Armenian side’s concerns about the envisaged actions and mechanisms not having always completely functioned, or not having functioned as they were supposed to, are well known, but this is an entirely different matter.
Here we can discuss the issue of effective implementation of the defined mechanisms, but there is no issue of reformatting these mechanisms or overall the relations on our agenda. We have relations also in multilateral unions, such as the CSTO. And I won’t say anything new that we are not satisfied over the CSTO’s response to very concrete events, and it is known that we have frozen our participation in that organization. I wouldn’t make any more far-reaching conclusions here, but I want to note that our discussions are very constructive, continual, these discussions have components regarding contentious issues, components pertaining to issues of positive dynamics, we have healthy collegial ties and healthy collegial discussions,” he said.
