YEREVAN — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on
Wednesday accused a Moscow-led security group of failing to give protection to
his country in the face of aggression from arch-foe Azerbaijan.
اضافة اعلان
Yerevan had accused Azerbaijan of occupying a pocket
of its land seized in September in fierce clashes between the neighbors, which
left more than 280 people dead.
Armenia is a member of the Collective Security
Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Moscow-led grouping of several ex-Soviet
republics.
“We have failed so
far to make a decision on CSTO’s reaction to Azerbaijan’s aggression against
Armenia,” Pashinyan said Wednesday during the organization’s heads of state
summit in Yerevan, which was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He said it was “depressing that Armenia’s membership
in the CSTO had failed to contain Azerbaijani aggression.”
“This fact is hugely damaging to the CSTO’s image
both in our country and abroad.”
Armenia in September had asked for military help
from Moscow, which is obligated under the treaty to defend Armenia in the event
of a foreign invasion.
But the Kremlin — which also has close ties with
Baku — did not rush to help Yerevan.
Pashinyan and Putin are due to meet for talks later
Wednesday.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars — in the
1990s and in 2020 — over Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
The six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 claimed the
lives of more than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a
Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had
controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to
oversee the fragile truce.
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