Secretary of the Security Council Armen Grigoryan commented, on the air of the Public Television, why Armenia will not attend the upcoming meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council.

"Starting from after the 2020 war, when the CSTO was saying that ‘Nagorno-Karabakh is not a sovereign part of Armenia, we cannot deal with these issues,’ Armenia does not participate in the meetings. But from May 2021, when the Azerbaijani troops invaded the sovereign territory of Armenia, we applied to the CSTO. And starting from that moment until September of last year, when Azerbaijan attacked Armenia and we asked for help [from the CSTO], we did not receive the necessary help to protect our sovereign territory. Since then we have had many questions to the CSTO, until now we don't have the answer to those questions, and this is also the reason why we are not participating in the [forthcoming] session of the CSTO Collective Security Council," he said.

To the question of whether Armenia gets the answers to the questions that concern it by not attending the CSTO meetings, Grigoryan responded that Armenia definitely does not get answers by participating in these sessions.

The Secretary of the Security Council did not consider Armenia’s non-participation in these meetings a demarche, but again noted that there are answers to questions that Armenia does not receive. He added, however, that a matter of Armenia leaving the CSTO was not on the agenda.

"We expect answers to questions related to the CSTO. I don't see any problem that we do not participate in any event within the framework of the CSTO," Grigoryan added.

Earlier we reported that Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan will not attend the upcoming meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council.