YEREVAN. – We have presented a demand that the Azerbaijanis leave the sovereign territory of Armenia; but they continue to stay and carry out provocations. Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia,  Armen Grigoryan, on Tuesday said this on Public Television, and referring to the border situation.

"The process is going so that we pass all this information to the CSTO, start discussions, figure out what solution we will give to the situation. The tension has decreased compared to noon, but that does not mean that there is calm; there is tension. Today there is already a casualty at the border, and this completely changes the situation. The CSTO must speed up starting a process, as well as sending a mission. The CSTO also has an obligation to send a mission to the conflict zone, or, in the current situation, to the territory of the given state, for the mission to give an assessment. We [Armenia] hope that the CSTO will send a mission; we have launched mechanisms with Russia, too," he said.

According to Grigoryan, as a result of the contacts between acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and President of Russia Vladimir Putin, there is also an agreement that the Azerbaijani troops must leave the territory of Armenia. "This is the position, and everyone can be said to share that position," he added.

The head of Armenia’s Security Council added: "If we fail to reach a speedy settlement through peaceful diplomacy, the situation will approach the situation described in Article 4 [of the CSTO]; and in that case, Armenia, also together with its CSTO partners, will have to resolve the issue in a different way. We continue to hope that the issue can be resolved through political diplomacy."

Grigoryan noted that the Armenian public's expectations did not become a reality very quickly, but he is convinced that the problem will be solved. "Since there are processes within the CSTO, the position of our allies is that the issue can be resolved peacefully, through diplomacy. This incident shows that the opportunities for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the problem are running out, and moreover, they create a situation to apply to the CSTO under Article 4 of the CSTO, and the CSTO must take this fact into account. We continue to hope that the problem will be solved through political-diplomatic means. If suddenly it will not be possible through political-diplomatic means, we will have to use other tools," he said.

And asked whether the Armenian government's view is that the aforesaid should be paralleled with the demarcation work with discussing the status of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Armen Grigoryan said: "We said that after the withdrawal of the [Azerbaijani] troops, it is possible to create an environment for us to start discussing these issues. We find that these issues are interconnected, our problems with Azerbaijan cannot be discussed separately; they are all interconnected."