Commenting to the Azerbaijan Press Club, Orkhan Yolchiyev, Director of the CASPIA Analytical Center, stated that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statements in recent years regarding the CSTO have been aimed more at political populism than at strategic realism. In his view, the CSTO is, by its very nature, a highly specific and limited organization. A look at its institutional history suggests that most of its activities have been reduced to military exercises or roundtable discussions of crises at summits, rarely progressing beyond declaratory formats.

Yolchiyev described Armenia’s 2021 appeal to the CSTO in the context of tensions with Azerbaijan as a “theater of the absurd.” He recalled that in 1992 Azerbaijan had similarly appealed to the  organization to protect its territorial integrity, with no practical outcome. Three decades later, Armenia appealed for similar reasons and received essentially the same result.

The very nature of CSTO mechanisms and the composition of its member states, he argued, are fundamentally incompatible with Armenia’s expectations. Article 4 of the CSTO charter, which provides for collective defense in the event of aggression, requires a complex consultation procedure and consensus among member states. According to Yolchiyev, the Armenian side approached the organization in 2020–2021 only after active hostilities had already ended. They understood that the CSTO would not become involved in what he described as their “adventurist scenario,” and therefore had an interest in keeping the consultation process itself out of the public eye.

In his assessment, no CSTO member state would ever have agreed to send its soldiers in support of what he called the “occupation of Azerbaijani territories,” especially given that all CSTO members maintain close relations with Azerbaijan. In 2021, when Tajikistan chaired the organization under President Emomali Rahmon, Armenia’s request was ultimately declined. Since CSTO decisions are taken by consensus, there was never a realistic prospect of unanimous backing for Yerevan’s position.

Yolchiyev further argued that the CSTO charter was not designed for limited border incidents, but rather for full-scale interstate wars of the kind seen in the First or Second World Wars. In the current environment, he believes genuine collective defense action by the organization is practically impossible.

According to him, Armenia is essentially trying to raise the stakes in political bargaining, but is doing so strictly within the boundaries allowed by its external patrons, without crossing any real “red lines.” Even though relations between Yerevan and Moscow are currently strained, he stressed that leaving the CSTO would change little in practical terms. More important are the hard realities on the ground: the Russian military base in Gyumri, the presence of FSB border units, and the joint Russian-Armenian air defense command structure. Against this backdrop, the formal CSTO status changes very little.

He also pointed to another revealing precedent: the border clashes between two CSTO allies, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

“What exactly did the organization do? Did it take any meaningful action at all?” he asked.

Yolchiyev recalled that during the 2020 clashes between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, tanks and mortars were used along the border. The most striking detail, he noted, was that at that very moment the Kyrgyz defense minister was in Dushanbe attending a CSTO Council of Defense Ministers meeting. The maximum response the organization delivered was a statement by then Secretary General Stanislav Zas calling on both sides to maintain peace.

For Yolchiyev, this case also demonstrates that the organization is not fully functional when it comes to protecting its allies or resolving military crises in practical terms. The charter itself contains no clause regulating scenarios in which member states come into direct conflict with one another.