ANTALYA (Turkey), March 2 Moscow is waiting for Yerevan to finally announce a final decision on its participation in the CSTO, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“We are waiting for everyone to officially confirm what the final decision will be, they say: here we will freeze in the CSTO de — in fact, but if we want, de jure we will freeze, de jure we will leave; the EurAsEC is still interesting to us, because we get something from there,» the minister said during a press conference.
The minister called it » not a very pretty picture.» “We would very much like our Armenian partners to decide for themselves how they want to continue to live and implement on a mutual basis those agreements that are not binding in a variety of integration structures,” he said.
According to him, the Armenian leadership decided to rely on extra-regional countries, “who are courting Yerevan and promising to help Yerevan in all its troubles, if only Armenia breaks off relations with Russia and the integration structures” that have been created in the region.
Lavrov also added that if the Armenian authorities decided to pursue a new policy, considering the nature of relations with Russia since the 90s to be erroneous, and relying on the opinion of the people, then this “makes it necessary to reconsider a lot in Russian-Armenian relations.”
Earlier, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that “the CSTO, instead of fulfilling its security obligations to Armenia, on the contrary, creates problems.” According to the prime minister, Armenia, which has effectively frozen participation in the CSTO, will also suspend participation legally if the current situation continues. Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia Armen Grigoryan previously called the republic’s strong dependence on Russia since 1991 a “strategic mistake.”