Asbarez:Azerbaijan is Derailing Agreements, Yerevan Warns CSTO

Artsakh has been under a blockade since Dec. 12, 2022


Yerevan said Thursday that Azerbaijan is actively derailing agreements reached between the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, among them the November 9, 2020 statement, which put an end to military actions after the Artsakh War.

Speaking at a summit of security council secretaries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Armenia’s National Security chief Armen Grigoryan emphasized that Azerbaijan continued to use force in an attempt to derail agreements.

Grigoryan also reported on Azerbaijan’s continued blockade of the Lachin Corridor in Artsakh.

According to his press service, Grigoryan called on his colleagues to give an unambiguous and targeted assessment of the current situation in Nagorno Karabakh and take effective measures in order prevent the ethnic cleansing of 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno Karabakh. 

He said that in this context creating an international mechanism ensuring the rights and security of the population in Nagorno Karabakh remains a priority for Armenia.

Grigoryan stressed that not acknowledging Azerbaijan aggression against Armenia’s sovereign territory and attempting to correlate that with not implementing the border delimitation process was groundless.

During the summit in Minsk, the security council leaders of CSTO member-states also discussed security challenges and regional threats, and decided to increase the number of joint military drills.

“Directions of cooperation in the military and migration spheres, as well as in the information space, were outlined. The importance of increasing the number of CSTO military exercises at different levels,” Russia’s security council said in a press statement, according to the Tass news agency.

The representatives of the CSTO countries paid special attention to the joint fight against international terrorism and extremism, strengthening the anti-terrorist potential of the organization.

“Taking into account the increase in terrorism threat in the immediate vicinity of CSTO’s zones of responsibility, decisions were made regarding the implementation of a complex of operational and preventive measures,” the statement added.