Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he would pull Armenia out of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) if he judged it necessary.
Pashinyan addressed the question of Armenia’s continued CSTO membership during pre-election debates with Narek Karapetyan of the Strong Armenia bloc.
Karapetyan noted that Armenia had suspended its CSTO membership and stopped paying dues to the organization. He argued that if the organization was not working, Armenia should leave — but that before doing so, it needed to find a security guarantor to stand between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Fine, we’ll leave the CSTO. What, are you trying to scare us? You don’t get to decide that — you or whoever’s got your back. We’ll decide and we’ll leave. Armenia is its own guarantor — the country, the military,” Pashinyan said, according to the Armenian news outlet News.am.
“We will decide — foreign agents won’t decide what to do. We won’t allow Lukashenko to become our guarantor again,” he added. In late May, Pashinyan devoted part of a campaign rally speech to criticizing Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who had said Armenia “is needed by no one.”
Armenia froze its CSTO membership in 2024 — after Nagorno-Karabakh came under Azerbaijani control and the ethnic Armenians who had lived there were forced to leave. In December 2024, Pashinyan said, “In effect, we already consider ourselves outside the CSTO.”
In April 2026, Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan said the country would leave both the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) if Russia raised the price of gas supplied to the republic.
Armenia holds parliamentary elections on June 7. Against this backdrop, relations between Moscow and Yerevan have deteriorated sharply. Russia accuses Nikol Pashinyan of attempting to draw closer to Western countries and the European Union.
Over the past several weeks, Russian authorities have banned imports of a number of goods from Armenia, including flowers, Jermuk mineral water, vegetables, herbs, peaches, strawberries, and fish. Pashinyan promised subsidies to affected exporters, and the European Union announced it would provide Armenia with 50 million euros in aid in response to economic pressure from Russia.
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