PM Pashinyan: Armenia's CSTO membership restoration becoming impossible

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has expressed the opinion that the restoration of the country's membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

The Prime Minister stressed that Armenia is not interested in the documents adopted within the CSTO, Caliber.Az reports, citing Russian media.

According to him, relations between Yerevan and the organisation have reached an irreversible point.

“We said that we freeze our participation in the CSTO activities, which means we no longer engage in discussions regarding any documents,” the politician said.

He added that Armenia simply does not veto any document because it considers itself outside the CSTO.

To recall, Armenia has recently moved toward distancing itself from the CSTO, a Russia-led security bloc. This shift became more apparent in 2024 when Armenia officially suspended its financial contributions to the CSTO's budget, signalling a deeper discontent with the organization.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has been vocal about Armenia's diminished reliance on CSTO, particularly after the group's lack of support during the 2020 Karabakh war and subsequent border clashes with Azerbaijan in 2022. Pashinyan criticized the CSTO for its failure to provide military assistance, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin said on November 28, 2024, in Astana that the CSTO was not obligated to intervene militarily on behalf of Yerevan in Karabakh, as there was no external aggression against Armenia in this case.

By Khagan Isayev