ArmInfo.Yuri Khachaturov's appointment for the post of CSTO Secretary will not affect the relations of member countries with Armenia. Such an opinion was stated by the Director of Institute for Caucasus stated on April 16 at a press conference in Yerevan.
He thinks that the delay of this appointment was preconditioned not by negative approach of Belarus or Kazakhstan, but with Russian-Belarusian conflict, which was solved with another bonus to Minsk. " The relations in this entity are preconditioned with more serious issues and in real the conflicts in this entity are not so big as the indifference of partners to other members' problems," the expert states.
According to him, this appointment should be estimated positively, but it will never affect any approaches of Organization, particularly in respect to Armenia. " One should not forget that it is a rotation-based post and, after all, it will be held by another member country," Iskandaryan summarized. To remind, on April 14 the CSTO member countries heads have approved Yuri Khachaturov to the post of the CSTO Secretary General.
To note, earlier it was decided to make the CSTO Secretary General's mandate rotating - once every three years in the alphabetical order. During the CSTO Collective Security Council's meeting in Yerevan on 14 Oct 2016, the participants were to name the Secretary General from Armenia. However, on October 14, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said that the issue of the CSTO Secretary General was removed from the agenda due to the absence of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. He added that the heads of the CSTO member states would consider that issue at a meeting in St. Petersburg in Dec 2016. However, this issue was not addressed in St. Petersburg either due to the absence of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.