Opinion | Violence has once again returned to Nagorno-Karabakh.
“There is a remarkable difference between Yerevan’s response to the most recent outbreak of violence and Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, as well as its subsequent border clashes. Back then, Armenia, as a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), appealed for military assistance from the alliance. Now the Armenian authorities have not even made such an attempt.
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CSTO was established in 2002 as a collective security organization in the post-Soviet space. From the very beginning, Russia has played a leading role by contributing a disproportionate share of its funding, and providing military resources and infrastructure to other member states in return for their support of Moscow’s policies
Accordingly, the organization only included countries that were willing to cooperate with Moscow. Today, CSTO consists of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan joined the organization in 2006 after an uprising in the city of Andijan the year before, when Uzbek government forces killed hundreds of unarmed protesters, but suspended its membership in 2012 as it pivoted its foreign policy away from Moscow.
The main formal rationale of CSTO was to provide military security through the mechanism of collective defense, which obliges all members to come to each other’s aid when attacked, as stipulated in Article 4 of the ogranization’s Treaty. In this respect, CSTO has some similarities with NATO, as Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty requires the same kind of collective defense.
However, after the color revolutions that led to the overthrow of several incumbent post-Soviet regimes in the mid-2000s, CSTO was given a new goal: to support the existing, mostly authoritarian political regimes of its member states. This aim was only reinforced after the Arab Spring, which saw the toppling of dictators and the eruption of civil wars across much of the Arab world.
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Armenia’s disillusionment with the CSTO is rooted in the organization’s refusal to help when war with Azerbaijan broke out again in 2022. However, unlike the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, Azerbaijan directly attacked Armenia’s sovereign territory during border clashes last year. Yerevan must have expected that Russia would have no choice but to call on other members of the alliance under Article 4.
But Russia did not come to Armenia’s aid. Having launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia was in no position to help its ally when it was directly attacked, as it was itself attacking a sovereign independent state for bogus reasons.
Armenia learned this lesson and began to reorient its foreign policy toward a new powerful ally — the United States. In September 2022, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Armenia, thus becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the country since its independence. And in January, Armenia refused to host CSTO military training. This past week, it held a joint training exercise with American troops.
At the same time, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan confirmed that Armenia will come under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In March, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.”
Once one of the Kremlin’s closest allies, Armenia is now conducting joint drills with US soldiers.
“Russia’s catastrophic invasion of Ukraine means Armenia can no longer rely on Moscow as a guarantor of its security, even as fears grow of a return to open conflict with Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told POLITICO in an interview.
Pashinyan’s unusually pointed criticism of Russia’s inability to act as a policeman in the Caucasus only compounds a sense the Kremlin is losing its influence — and once much-vaunted superpower status — across former Soviet republics that Moscow once saw as its stamping ground.
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“As a result of the events in Ukraine, the capabilities of Russia have changed,” Pashinyan said, acknowledging that Moscow was seeking to avoid alienating Azerbaijan and its close ally Turkey, both of which have risen in strategic importance for the Kremlin since the start of the Ukraine war last year.
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Inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders but controlled by its ethnic Armenian population, Nagorno-Karabakh has been the scene of two wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Russia stepping in on both occasions to guarantee its security.
Now, it seems Moscow’s ability to guarantee the status quo is evaporating.
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The frustration with the failure of Russian forces to help forms part of a pattern of worsening ties between Moscow and Yerevan.
Last week, the Russian foreign ministry said it had summoned the Armenian ambassador for a “difficult” conversation over what it described as a string of unfriendly steps, citing a decision by Yerevan to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine for the first time, with Pashinyan’s wife, Anna Hakobyan, making an official visit to Kyiv. Armenia has also withdrawn its representative to the Moscow-led CSTO military alliance of which it is a member, having previously accused the bloc of failing to act on its requests for support after Azerbaijan launched an offensive across the border last September.
Instead, it has invited U.S. soldiers to stage joint drills in the country as part of exercises codenamed Eagle Partner 2023. Russia has hit out at the decision.
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At the same time as acknowledging the need to break reliance on the old ally in Russia, Pashinyan admitted there was a long way to go before Western countries could be seen as offering the full support Armenia needs.
“Our partners, the EU and the United States are also supporting us when it comes to democratic reforms agenda,” he said, before adding: “I cannot say that the support and the help that we are receiving is sufficient to serve our objectives and our agendas.””
Russia's Defense Ministry said that a car carrying Russian peacekeepers came under fire in Nagorno-Karabakh and that all servicemen died.
“Russian peacekeepers stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh were killed during shelling, the Kremlin said Wednesday. This has dealt a blow to the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as Azerbaijan claimed control of the breakaway region following a brief military offensive.
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The news comes as the CSTO, founded in 2002, appears to be peril against the backdrop of flaring violence in the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh. This is led by ethnic Armenians in the region, and is recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan. The CSTO is a military alliance of six post-Soviet states—Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan—that has been likened to a smaller version of NATO.
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Pashinyan has decried CSTO inaction and a tepid response from Russia after triggering the security bloc's Article 4 in September 2022. This declares that any "aggression against CSTO member states is considered by other participants as aggression against everyone."
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Mark Temnycky of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) said in analysis on September 6 that, two decades after it was founded, CSTO is "fracturing, emphasizing the Kremlin's weakening hold on its neighbors."”
Russia’s version of NATO is collapsing as Vladimir Putin fails his ally Armenia as Azerbaijan cracks down in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Despite Russia’s ironclad commitment to defend the other member states from aggression, as is specified in Article 4 of the Collective Security Treaty (akin to NATO’s Article 5), Moscow’s support never came.
Pashinyan noted that, thanks to Russia’s absence, Armenia and Azerbaijan have had to seek the help of Western institutions like the EU to come to a peace agreement, as “the security system in the region” — i.e., the CSTO — “is not working.”
Pashinyan threatened to have Armenia withdraw from the alliance completely.”
