Imangali Tasmagambetov, who is due to visit Yerevan soon, claimed that Pashinian did not fly to Minsk for the summit last Thursday for merely “technical” reasons.
“In my view, it makes no sense to draw any categorical conclusions from this situation,” Tasmagambetov told the TASS news agency. “Armenia was and remains our ally.”
Pashinian’s boycott of the summit highlighted his government’s mounting tensions with the other CSTO member states and Russia in particular. Pashinian on Friday again accused the CSTO of not honoring its security commitments to Armenia. What is more, he did not rule out the possibility of eventually pulling his country out of his alliance.
Speaking on the eve of the Minsk summit, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that Pashinian’s administration is planning a “radical change” of Armenia’s traditional geopolitical orientation at the behest of Western powers. The ministry had earlier accused it of “ruining” Russian-Armenian relations.
For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed over the weekend the criticism of the CSTO voiced by Pashinian as well as other Armenian leaders. Peskov expressed hope that Yerevan will soon resume its “full-fledged participation in the organization.”
Earlier this year, Armenia also refused to participate in CSTO military exercises and boycotted a meeting of the defense ministers of the bloc’s member states.