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YEREVAN, Armenia — Armenia will formally withdraw from its military alliance with Moscow, the country’s prime minister announced Wednesday, as tensions grow with Russia.
Nikol Pashinyan declared in parliament that “we will leave” the Kremlin’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and that “we will decide the timing of our exit.”
“It turned out that the members of the alliance are not fulfilling their contractual obligations, but are planning a war against us with Azerbaijan,” he said.
The military bloc — Russia’s answer to NATO — is made up of six former Soviet states: Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
However, Pashinyan has accused the CSTO of failing to intervene after his country was attacked by neighboring Azerbaijan in 2022. He has also said Russian peacekeepers failed in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh last year, when Azerbaijan launched an offensive that sparked the mass exodus of its 100,000 ethnic Armenian residents.
As a result, Armenia had vowed it would “freeze” its membership of the alliance, recall its representatives and would not contribute financially to its budget. Moscow has insisted that Yerevan will be “obliged” to pay its dues regardless.
Instead, Pashinyan’s government has staged joint drills with U.S. forces, called for help from the West to strengthen its democracy and even hinted it could one day seek to join the EU. Russian border guards have since been withdrawn from their positions along Armenia’s borders with its neighbors.
However, according to Vasif Huseynov of Azerbaijan’s AIR Center think tank, Armenia’s ongoing economic dependency on Russia means “its complete departure from Moscow’s orbit does not seem realistic” at this stage. Russia maintains a monopoly over key parts of trade with Armenia, as well as over its energy and infrastructure.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry declined to provide any further details beyond the Prime Minister’s comments.
