Armenian Security Council Secretary Alen Simonyan has responded to the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO)’s decision to strip Armenia of its voting rights by publishing poems in Russian. Moscow sarcastically drafted a line in response.

On Wednesday, Armenia was stripped of its voting rights in Russia-led CSTO, as well as the right to appoint representatives to senior positions within the bloc, over its failure to pay membership fees.

The decision was not unexpected for the Armenian leadership, which effectively ‘froze’ its participation in the military alliance in February 2024. Yerevan cited the bloc’s failure to fulfil its security obligations towards Armenia during Azerbaijani attacks in 2021 and 2022, resulting in over 200 Armenian military deaths and occupation of Armenian land.

Yerevan then said that the CSTO’s refusal to come to its aid ‘could not have gone without consequences’. It subsequently announced it would stop making the required financial contributions. By the time of the freeze in 2024, Yerevan had already been absent from major CSTO meetings and military exercises for around a year.

Simonyan responded to the decision on Thursday with a short poem in Russian:

‘They deprived us of our voice there,
where everyone remained very loudly silent
while we were all being killed together’.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova subsequently said with apparent sarcasm that the poem actually had a fourth line.

‘The last line goes: “Simonyan made up the tale” ’, Zakharova said.

In response, Simonyan published another poem in Russian.

‘The response to the little poem was swift, what a pity [the response] was not so swift when they were shooting at us point-blank!’, he wrote, referring to the Azerbaijani attacks on Armenia in 2021 and 2022.

The poem continued:

‘Don’t confuse it with Simonyan’s tales — she plays whatever tune you order,
don’t confuse it with the mirror I gave you.
With love, Alen Simonyan’.

The reference to ‘Simonyan’ was directed at Margarita Simonyan, a well known Kremlin propagandist of Armenian origin who frequently criticises Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government.

Moscow ‘distorts’ facts

Moscow rejects Yerevan’s explanations for why it has effectively stopped participating in CSTO.

Armenia stopped contributing to the military alliance after Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin repeatedly claimed that the CSTO could not intervene in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, Armenian officials have constantly stressed that Yerevan’s appeals for help from CSTO concerned Azerbaijani attacks on Armenian territory, not in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Parliamentary Speaker Ruben Rubinyan claimed that the account of why Armenia had suspended participation in the bloc had been distorted. ‘It is true that we are no longer interested in the CSTO, but historical events must be presented accurately’, Rubinyan said, in an introduction to a Facebook video statement published in the wake of Armenia’s voting rights being stripped on Thursday.

He stressed that Armenia had never appealed to the CSTO over Nagorno-Karabakh, but had turned to the bloc following attacks on its internationally recognised territory in 2021 and 2022. ‘That was when Armenia appealed to the CSTO and expected its treaty obligations to be fulfilled, when an attack takes place on the sovereign territory of a CSTO member state.’

‘This was not done. And all attempts to justify this are doomed to fail, because it is impossible to justify the inaction of an organisation whose entire purpose is to protect the sovereign territory of its member states, which it failed to do, violating its own treaty’, Rubinyan said.

Separately, Belarusian Foreign Minister Maksim Ryzhankou suggested  Armenia should be denied access to classified CSTO documents.

‘Why should we give such a pseudo-ally full access to documentation that is fairly confidential in nature?’, he said, according to Belarusian state media.

Ryzhankou also raised the possibility that access to such documents could be exploited in ways contrary to the interests of countries seeking to deepen integration within the bloc.