I believe Armenia’s message is becoming clearer and more understandable for our colleagues, and the recent public statements on this substantiate this. This is what Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan stated during a question-and-answer session with government officials at the National Assembly today, touching upon the question whether there is progress in the sale of weapons to Azerbaijan by Russia and member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

“In any case, Armenia needs to defend its national interests at all levels, especially in the context that is related to our national security. We simply continue to state the fact that Armenia is a part of the CSTO. If you paid attention, the question I asked in Bishkek was in a totally different context. I said I was certain that the CSTO has all the leverages to disallow further escalation in our region, particularly the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

I believe that if there is new escalation in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, this will be a very interesting environment for the Islamic terrorists losing their base in Syria, and Azerbaijan can become a very good base for them. We have information that there are several citizens of Azerbaijan who are part of the Islamic State. If they succeed in having their base in Azerbaijan, they can act in all directions, and at least two of those directions are CSTO member states,” the Prime Minister said.

When asked how he would assess the current stage of settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, taking into consideration the fact that there are views that there is serious progress since the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation has left for Baku and the Prime Minister of Armenia has left for Artsakh, Pashinyan said the following: “The Russian foreign minister’s visit to Baku was scheduled a long time ago, and the day had been announced before I had set the date for the meeting with the President of Artsakh. So, my visit to Artsakh had nothing to do with Lavrov’s visit to Baku.”