The aggravation of the situation in the south of Armenia in connection with the establishment of a new border with Azerbaijan is a “border incident” and does not fall under the provisions of the CSTO charter on collective defense, Secretary General of the organization Stanislav Zas told the journalists, TASS reports.
“You have to understand that the potential of CSTO is used only in the event of an aggression, an attack [on one of the member countries]. Here we are dealing, in fact, with a border incident. Thank God, there are no casualties; there are no shooting there. This is a border incident, it must be solved, and we are in favor of solving it peacefully,” he said.
According to him, there is no escalation of the conflict. “In principle, now it is not necessary to say that the situation there is growing somehow. It does not suffer - this is already good, this is already a result. There is a lot of work ahead on the border issue, the resolution of all these controversial issues must be around negotiation table,” Zas stated.
CSTO Secretary General also informed that after the May appeal of Armenia, the organization held consultations on the situation in the border regions of the country. “Such consultations were held at the level of defense ministers, secretaries of security councils, and I contacted both the Armenian foreign minister and the defense minister. We discussed this situation. In addition, we already had a general discussion of this situation during the Ministerial Council [Council of Ministers Foreign Affairs of the CSTO] in Dushanbe,” he said.
Zas assured that CSTO is constantly monitoring the situation in the south of Armenia. “The decision to form a monitoring group was not made, although, of course, the situation is being monitored,” the secretary general said. The organization receives the necessary information from many sources, including the Armenian side and Russian peacekeepers, Zas added.
