Pashinyan Knew Very Well What Was Going to Happen: Hohikyan on the CSTO Statement

Journalist Nairi Hohikyan wrote on his Facebook page: "What to understand from the CSTO response? After the enemy's incursion into Armenia's Syunik and Gegharkunik provinces, for 1.5 months, the Prime Minister of Armenia was desperately calling for CSTO assistance, pointing to the provisions under which this organization should ensure the security of its member state. But.

I'm sure that Nikol Pashinyan knew very well in May what was going to happen, but since this was yet another occasion to discredit Russia and everything related to the Russian Federation, he did it. It doesn’t matter that as a result, Armenia's security system collapsed in several areas.

First, by initiating a criminal case against CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov in 2018, Armenia was, in fact, preparing for today's situation, as Belarusian representative Stanislav Zas was set to automatically take his place.

Throughout 2019, I repeatedly raised concerns about this person’s dangerousness, even consulting with the Prime Minister's office, where the then-press secretary Vladmir Karapetyan responded to me. None of the high officials in Armenia saw the danger that Stanislav Zas, who lived in Azerbaijan until 1995, had business ties, was appointed Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus in 2015, and started close cooperation with NATO, regularly visiting Turkey, assured Ilham Aliyev during his visit to Azerbaijan on September 27, 2017, that he would do everything to strengthen cooperation with Azerbaijan and take steps for mutual support on international platforms.

In April 2018, Azerbaijan signed its first export agreement for the supply of Belarusian-produced "Polonez" multiple-launch rocket systems with the official mediation of Stanislav Zas, and in June of the same year, the first batch was supplied to Azerbaijan.

After laying out all these facts, the highest officials of Armenia in 2019 assured me through various channels that they knew what they were doing, as always. On May 28, Nikol Pashinyan embraced Ilham Aliyev's favorite affiliate Stanislav Zas, giving his consent for him to become the CSTO Secretary General.

The ordinary Armenian citizen may not know what kind of creature Stanislav Zas is and how he cooperated and continues to cooperate with our enemy against us. But it is ignorance for the highest authorities of the country not to know, or as I’m more inclined to think, it’s an unpatriotic tendency.

During the 2020 war and afterwards, Azerbaijan repeatedly used aggression against Armenia. In 2021, Azerbaijan entered the regions of Gegharkunik and Syunik in Armenia. In no case was there any targeted response from the CSTO, and on July 3, the same Stanislav Zas officially declared that the issues of Vardenis and Lake Sevan were "border incidents," therefore, the CSTO had no role to play.

A thinking person should be able to connect phenomena through time and grasp the thread that will one day confront them with a major problem. Yet these naive individuals in Armenia continue to insist that the problems are being systematically discussed and resolved.

Since 2018, these incompetent officials have dismantled all systems that existed in semi-European Armenia, and now they want a system from the Central Asian countries. What kind of system? Do you believe that there should be systematic governance within the CSTO? That would be the same as saying that there should be systematic governance in the Armenian government or the Prime Minister's office."