"Jeremiad" at Yerevan-based CSTO Parliamentary Assembly meeting
Mothballs of Simonyan and Papikyan

ANALYTICS  08 June 2022 - 11:00

The next meeting of the Council of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO] was held this time in Armenia. The event, I must say, is of very dubious relevance. In the current geopolitical situation, when the CSTO members look at each other with concern with a mute question in their eyes: "What will happen next?", the concept of collective security is perhaps the most formal topic on any agenda. Nowadays, most of the CSTO countries are not concerned about their collective security at all, but directly about their own security. Moreover, the same CSTO acts as the trigger of the threat, for example, by taking part in the pacification of riots in Kazakhstan last winter.

That's right, but the event would not be cancelled. And considering that Armenia is currently chairing the CSTO, and the meeting was held in Yerevan, it was not without a ridiculous political show, of course. In general, Yerevan is very fond of events of an international format, where you can cry in the vest of leaders of different countries and foreign organisations, and therefore the meeting of parliamentarians from the CSTO was no exception. Moreover, this is the only thing Yerevan is more or less capable of. It is a paradox, but Azerbaijan enjoys much more trust and partner support from the CSTO countries than Armenia, which is allied with them. Belarus or Kazakhstan, for example, absolutely do not expect a trick or threats from the Azerbaijan-Türkiye tandem, but they are wary of any intrigues from Yerevan, which has repeatedly tried to involve the bloc countries in its provocations in the South Caucasus. Yerevan's participation in the deployment of Treaty troops to Kazakhstan looks very unambiguous, which has caused concern, including in the community of Turkic countries. Why hide the truth? The alarm was not hidden in the CSTO itself.

So at such a meeting, Armenia was almost expected to begin some kind of "jeremiad", fortunately, it could be done completely fearlessly - Azerbaijan is not a participant in the CSTO bloc and is not present at the meetings. And it is unlikely that it will ever be. In this sense, Baku has secured itself as much as possible from all sides without major obligations – Baku and Moscow have their own big union agreement, where the Kremlin even undertakes to provide military assistance in case of emergency. However, I think Baku will do without it anyway.

Armenian National Assembly Speaker Alen Simonyan was not particularly surprised in this sense, as he had the obvious duty to "troll" Azerbaijan, once again accusing it of some fictitious threat and "invasion" of the borders of Armenia. However, this time Simonyan, albeit sluggishly, went further - he tried to pit Azerbaijan and Russia against each other. According to him, "Azerbaijani units' invasion of the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh is of concern". He hoped that representatives of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, who are assigned a role in ensuring the security of the ethnic Armenian population of Azerbaijan's Karabakh region, "will restore the status quo of the Trilateral Statement of November 9, 2020".

But then Simonyan agreed to a concrete absurdity, which was certainly noticed by representatives of the CSTO countries. It is difficult to understand what kind of "restoration of the status quo of the Trilateral Statement" Mr Simonyan is talking about. It is unclear why, then, nothing like this has been heard from Russian representatives at the same meeting. The Kremlin, for example, has no doubt that the process of implementing the provisions of the Trilateral Statement is very successful, moreover, it is "with the light hand" of Moscow. And it is not surprising that he thinks so, because he knows that the Russian peacekeepers themselves in Karabakh, to put it mildly, have a snout in the through. And Azerbaijan is sometimes forced to do their job – to return to their native lands Armenian militants actively advancing abroad and their posts jumping back and forth, to neutralise illegal Armenian armed formations, which, according to clause 4 of the Trilateral Statement, should have been taken out of Karabakh by the same Russian peacekeepers for a long time.

But in this case, Simonyan's attacks turned out to be even more ridiculous, since they are refuted by the Armenian defence minister's remarks made in an interview with Armenian Public Television over the CSTO meeting. As a result, he lied while also telling the truth in the end. Having worked out the "formal agenda", where he blamed Azerbaijan for the shootings on the border, Papikyan suddenly stated that "at this stage, we do not see any danger from Azerbaijan", including the danger of "any war". And then what are the alarms and statements, in fact, if there is no danger? Are we just talking just to talk?

Well, then Simonyan led the minds of the CSTO parliamentarians into very distant wilds, saying that the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship should play a key role in promoting the peace process. The OSCE, whose very existence has been declared unthinkable in Moscow, recognises that the current disagreements between the EU and the US with Russia make it simply impossible for this mission to continue its operations. The OSCE Minsk Group, however, continues to exist for Simonyan, who appears to be in a somnambulistic dream. Here's the issue. "In order to achieve comprehensive peace," he says, "we supplemented the agenda with our proposals and handed it over to the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group". That is, they were actually transferred "to nowhere". Perhaps all of this happened in Simonyan's sacred dream.

And here there is already a certain general idea about the goals and objectives of the strange CSTO meeting in Yerevan: like the archaic and obviously losing its relevance configuration of the block itself, the statements made on it were devoid of logic and meaning, from which there was a thorough smell of "mothballs".

Caliber.Az