Armenia is looking for a reason to complain to the CSTO

Baku/12.01.22/Turan: From  January 11 night until  January 12 morning, the Armenian side fired the Azerbaijani positions in settlements of the Kelbajar and Tovuz regions. Is  this provocation by Armenia  an attempt to invite the CSTO to its country?

Political observer Oktay Gasimov answers these and other questions in the "Difficult Question" program.

In his words, this is not the first and hardly the last case of violation of the ceasefire by the Armenian side. Provocations will not stop until a peace treaty is signed, mutual recognition of borders, their demarcation and delimitation is done.

“Now Armenia is trying to take advantage of the situation around Kazakhstan in order to  attract the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) into the confrontation between it and Azerbaijan. Obviously, the Armenian side wants to take advantage of the formal chairmanship of Nikol Pashinyan in this organization, as well as the dispatch of an Armenian military contingent to Kazakhstan. However, it will not work,” Gasimov said.

In his opinion, the prompt reaction of the CSTO to the appeal of the President of Kazakhstan to send troops to Kazakhstan gave rise to the illusion in Armenia that it is possible to involve this organization (read Russia - Ed.) in the processes going on between Baku and Yerevan.

However, Gasimov is sure, on November 16, 2021, an even larger incident of this kind took place. “But even then, the CSTO official statement said something like the following: the CSTO Secretariat did not receive official appeals from the Armenian side in connection with the situation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and that the conflict should be resolved only by peaceful political and diplomatic means,” he said.

The observer recalled that the issues between Azerbaijan and Armenia are regulated by a trilateral ceasefire statement signed on the night of November 9-10, 2020 by President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin;  and a joint statement on the results  of negotiations in Moscow on January 11, 2021 and on November 26 in Sochi between  President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.

“These agreements must be observed and implemented. And the likelihood of the implementation of the plans hatched by Armenia is unlikely, since Russia itself is a participant in these processes,” the expert believes.