A Warning From The East To The West: Russian-Led CSTO Alliance Vows to Face Down Threats, From Europe to Central Asia

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Russian-Led CSTO Alliance Vows to Face Down Threats, From Europe to Central Asia

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On Friday, leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a defensive alliance including Russia and five other states, met in Yerevan to adopt the bloc’s new security strategy to the year 2025. Political analyst Gevorg Mirzayan says that now more than ever, bloc unity is vital to ensuring security in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In addition to the new broad security strategy, officials from the CSTO’s six member states – Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, signed a number of documents aimed at streamlining operations under the bloc’s framework, including the creation of a crisis response center aimed, among other things, at the exchange of information and analysis on security-related subjects in real time.

The members adopted a separate statement on the Nagorny-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which exploded in April of this year, leaving at least a hundred soldiers and civilians dead in clashes that took place between April and May. The bloc also approved the creation of single, unified list of terrorist groups.

“A number of serious documents and decisions, related to the significant strengthening of the organization’s potential, improvement of the collective security mechanisms and working bodies, were approved,” Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said at a press conference on Friday in Yerevan.

Commenting on the summit in an article for Expert magazine, Gevorg Mirzayan, associate professor of political science at Russia’s Financial University, emphasized that to get a sense of the CSTO’s role in maintaining security in the former Soviet space, it’s necessary to understand what the organization is actually designed to accomplish.

What it is not, Mirzayan stressed, is an organization aimed at coordinating members’ foreign policy, including policy using military power. What it is, as its name hints, is a defensive alliance, an organization for ‘collective security’.

In other words, while its members’ foreign policy views and objectives may vary, “this does not contradict the real goals and challenges facing the CSTO; these goals are very specific, and the bloc is coping with them effectively on all fronts.” Paradoxically as it may seem, the analyst noted that the so-called western direction, facing Europe, “is considered the safest. It’s true that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated the need to ‘force’ the North Atlantic Alliance to recognize the CSTO.
It’s also true that anti-Russian war hysteria has exploded in Western countries, to the point of talking about attacking Russia with a preemptive nuclear strike. Legally, in case of a NATO attack on Belarus and Russia, all CSTO member countries will be forced to go to war, even if they themselves do not face the threat of invasion.”
Hopefully, Mirzayan suggested, the tone of NATO countries’ rhetoric, particularly that coming out of Washington, will return to some sense of normalcy following elections in November, even if relations between the collective West and Russia don’t improve.
Caucasian Compact In the Caucasus, one of the key challenges facing the organization is preventing the resumption of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Nagorno Karabakh. “Since Armenia is a member of the CSTO, its members, including Russia, must guarantee the security of Armenian territory.

From this perspective, the bloc was faced with a serious test in the events of April, when Baku initiated hostilities in the region which affected Armenian territory.”

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/politics/201610161046391802-csto-security-challenges-analysis/

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