Pashinian already accused them of failing to honor their security commitments to Armenia when he announced the membership suspension two years ago. He went on to declare that the CSTO poses an existential threat to it. Moscow has dismissed those accusations.
Pashinian went farther on Wednesday in a statement on the 34th anniversary of the official creation of the Armenian army.
“As of September 2022, the CSTO partners were refusing to fulfill their contractual obligations to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the Republic of Armenia,” he said. “They were also refusing to supply hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and equipment for which Armenia had already made payments. This was an existential threat to Armenia, and it was obvious that a decision was made to eliminate our statehood and nullify our sovereignty.”
Pashinian said this was the reason why he halted Armenia’s participation in CSTO meetings and other activities and recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh during a European Union summit in Prague in October 2022. But he remained careful not to give any dates for Yerevan’s formal withdrawal from the alliance.
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Pashinian’s October 2022 decision paved the way for Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that restored Azerbaijani control over Karabakh. They also say his administration has failed to rebuild the Armenian armed forces since Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war in Karabakh.
“We note with pain that over the past eight years everything has been done to weaken, divide, and break what was the most combat-ready and victorious army in the region,” former President Robert Kocharian said on Wednesday in a statement issued on the occasion.
Pashinian claimed the opposite, saying that the Armenian army is becoming stronger “every day.”
“In recent years, we have acquired a huge amount of modern weapons and military equipment of such quality and parameters that our army has never had,” he said without elaborating.
Pashinian seemed to refer to multimillion-dollar defense contracts signed with India and France.
Russia had long been Armenia’s principal supplier of weapons and ammunition. Yerevan has been looking for alternative sources of weaponry due to its heightened tensions with Moscow and the continuing war in Ukraine that absorbs the bulk of military hardware manufactured in Russia.
