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The “classical approaches” to ensuring security have proven ineffective, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Monday.
He discussed his administration’s security strategy, the role of the CSTO, and the bloc’s approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh issue few years ago.
Pashinyan made the remarks at the Comprehensive Security and Resilience 2025 International Forum in Yerevan.
According to him, the country’s previous security concept was based on two main instruments: a military-political alliance and the armed forces. However, this formula failed, he said.
“The CSTO states that Azerbaijan is as much a brotherly state as Armenia, and that it recognizes Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. This position has always existed, but we often tried to ignore it or interpret it differently.
In November and December 2020, Russia clearly stated that, from the perspective of international law, Nagorno-Karabakh has always been considered a part of Azerbaijan. Meaning, the concept of relying on a military-political alliance did not work in the case of Karabakh,” Pashinyan said.
The Prime Minister also addressed Azerbaijan’s violations of Armenia’s sovereign territory in May 2021 and September 2022.
“In both cases, the CSTO’s response was the same: they claimed the borders were not delimited, and therefore it was questionable whether there had been an incursion into Armenian territory or not,” Pashinyan said.
He emphasized that this raised a critical question: did Armenia itself fully recognize its own territorial integrity? From this, a new focus in the national security doctrine began to emerge — legitimacy.
“We understood that if we wanted to ensure our security, we had to rely on undisputable legitimacy. This meant recognizing, based on the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, the inviolability of the 29,743 square kilometers of internationally recognized territory and borders of the Republic of Armenia,” he said, calling this shift a turning point in the country's security concept.
“Legitimacy became a key instrument of our strategy, and we built our next steps on that foundation.”