YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan delivered remarks at the joint defense ministerial meeting of CIS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the CSTO countries.

He said that recently escalation of disagreements is observed in the South-Caucasian region, which in his words are the consequence of some countries expanding their ambitions.  

“The dynamically developing military-political developments in our region can be described as a conflict of geopolitical interests, the core factor of which is the absence of a common vision of security, as well as mechanisms for minimizing risks,” he said.

“Regional conflicts don’t have a solution by force, and Armenia considers unacceptable both military rhetoric and the attempts of involving new states in these conflicts with further escalation of the situation in the region.”

Tonoyan stressed that Russia’s presence in the region, as well as the deepening of the military-political cooperation between Armenia and Russia are highly important suppressing factors which contribute to regional stability and preservation of security.

He said that Armenia’s strategic interests sector’s domain includes not only the Caucasian region but the entire CSTO zone, as well as the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean region. The defense minister said Armenia is interested in peace and stability in these regions.

“In the current conditions the further deepening and expansion of multilateral defense cooperation is becoming especially important, moreover, first of all between the CIS, the SCO and the CSTO, which our countries are members of,” Tonoyan said.

 “Our world has become more interconnected, any instability in any given region is fraught with negative consequences globally. In other words, in modern conditions regional security is impossible to be ensured autonomously – outside of global security system frameworks. The escalation of any regional issue is very directly impacting overall international security. This relates not only to military-political issues, but also the pandemic, which as the experience of the majority of countries showed grew into a universal security problem,” Tonoyan said.

The Armenian Defense Minister stressed that the international community’s main objective is to build a sustainable peace which is based on ruling out the creation of new instability hotspots when some countries attempt to impose regional geopolitical ambitions.

“We proceed from the fact that the undeviating preservation of international law norms and principles plays a core role in preventing conflicts. The Republic of Armenia has always been in favor of the equal application of international law and the right of freedom of choice, reasonable globalization and international security architecture, based on the refraining from the policy “from positions of force” and maximalist approaches, rhetoric of hate and bellicose statements”.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan