Pashinyan: Next logical step will be Armenia's leaving CSTO

The opposition claims that the policies of the Armenian government contradict the government's 2021-2026 action plan in a number of cases, so the government should resign, and they cite several concrete examples for this. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this in his address during the debates on the Armenian government's 2023 state budget performance, in the National Assembly Thursday.

"For example, the situation created around CSTO; for example, the issue related to Nagorno-Karabakh and its status, which are reflected on in the program. Why do we disagree with the opposition's claims? What have we written in the government's program on CSTO? I quote: ‘Armenia will continue to be actively engaged in the work of the organization and work towards the improvement and application of the collective security mechanisms of the contractual and document base, which will best reflect and serve the interests and joint objectives of the member states.’ That is, we wrote that we have questions related to CSTO and we should go after getting the answers to those questions.

By the way, we wrote this in the summer of 2021, in an environment when the invasion of Azerbaijani troops had already taken place in the Sotk-Khoznavar sector. And before that, we had received an assurance from the CSTO that the border of Armenia is a red line for the organization and its allies.

But already at that moment, the invasion of May 12 was not followed by a proper reaction of the CSTO, in the government's program we very gently had questioned the issue of at least the efficiency of the CSTO," said Pashinyan.

He continued that they later realized that the CSTO, whose duty is to protect the territorial integrity of Armenia, refuses to fulfill its duties.

"At the CSTO summit in Yerevan in November 2022, we had refused to sign the CSTO documents that did not meet the interests of Armenia, and we did it in fulfillment of the government's program. That is, what is the opposition saying now? That we should have meekly signed those papers which did not correspond to the government's program and the interests of our country, which questioned our sovereignty and territorial integrity? And since we didn't do that, we need to resign?" said the Armenian PM.

Pashinyan announced that the next logical step for Armenia will be to leave the CSTO.

"We did not say in the government program that we will remain a CSTO member. We have said we have questions, the answers of which we will go after. We will decide when it happens. Maybe a month, maybe a year," he said.