Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement that there was no external attack against Armenia, and therefore no legal reason for launching the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)’s protection clause, has sparked outrage in Armenia, with many arguing the claim was false and served to obfuscate Azerbaijan's attack on Armenia. 

On Thursday, in response to a question at the CSTO summit in Kazakhstan, which Armenia sat out, Putin claimed that the CSTO had nothing to do with the developments in Nagorno-Karabakh and further insisted that ‘there was no aggression against Armenia’.

‘The CSTO is designed to protect member countries from external aggression. The events related to Nagorno-Karabakh have their own specifics, because Armenia did not recognize Karabakh as an independent state, and certainly did not include Karabakh in its state perimeter. This means that everything that happened in Karabakh, from a legal point of view, has no direct relation to Armenia,’ Putin said.

Putin suggested that the Armenian leadership had claimed that the CSTO should fight on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which he characterised as ‘strange’. 

The statement caused outrage in Armenia, with local fact-checkers quickly debunking the claims.

Fip.am wrote that Armenia did not ask for help from the CSTO during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, but instead appealed for military assistance during the Azerbaijani attack on Armenia in September 2022.

Sossi Tatikyan, a foreign policy and security analyst, called for the Armenian government to ‘clearly expose Putin's totally disingenuous statements, as well as legally formalise and finalise its exit from the CSTO’.

Tatikyan said Putin’s ‘false and manipulative statement’ was aimed at denying Azerbaijan’s violation of territorial integrity of Armenia through successive military offensives, which resulted in the ‘occupation of [roughly] 250 square kilometres of sovereign [Armenian] territory’.

Gayane Abrahamyan, a former MP from the ruling faction and founder of a local rights NGO, wrote that Putin’s statement was ‘yet another confirmation and a green light to his ally [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev, that we do not consider Jermuk and the other occupied territories as part of the sovereign territory of Armenia, so you can calmly solve the issue of the corridor.’ 

Abrahamyan was referring to the so-called ‘Zangezur Corridor’ through southern Armenia, which would theoretically connect western Azerbaijan with the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. Aliyev threatened in 2021 to use force to establish the ‘corridor’ 

Armenia ‘froze’ its membership in the CSTO in February, citing the refusal of the alliance to aid Armenia in the face of Azerbaijani attacks in 2021 and 2022.

According to Putin, Armenia’s current attitude toward the CSTO is ‘most likely’ dictated by internal political processes all of which are ‘connected with the consequences of the crisis in Karabakh.’

The Russian president also said that Armenia has not announced its withdrawal from the CSTO, claiming that ‘it supports all the documents that were adopted during our meeting today and during the negotiations’. 

‘It is drawing our attention to this point.  If this is so, then there is a possibility that Armenia will return to full-scale work within the framework of this organization,’ Putin said.

 For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.