Moscow summit tests Russia's waning grip on former Soviet allies

Russian President Vladimir Putin will chair a session of the Collective Security Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Russia-dominated post-Soviet military bloc, in Moscow on Wednesday — but the Kremlin's tense relationship with Armenia will be under the spotlight at the summit.

Since February 2024, Armenia's participation in the bloc has been frozen. While the membership technically exists, Armenia does not take part in the bloc's activities, having effectively boycotted it after it lost a war against Azerbaijan.

Yerevan blamed the group for failing to offer meaningful support during the conflict with Azerbaijan.

Armenia de facto doesn't participate in the CSTO's operations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week. What happens next will depend on the nature of the discussions within the organisation, he said.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on November 5 that our interest in the CSTO has run its course.

During the 2020 war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region once dominated by ethnic Armenians, the CSTO failed to live up to its core principle. Neither Russia nor other member states — Belarus and the three Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — deployed troops to aid Armenia, though the CSTO's charter envisages such aid.

Moscow also maintains two military bases in Armenia with thousands of servicemen and border guards.

Azerbaijan, which withdrew from the CSTO in 1999, used new weaponry procured from Russia for billions of dollars. Baku's military triumph also relied on Turkish and Israeli-made drones and a revised war playbook that reflected recent breakthroughs in warfare and military technology.

Pashinyan's anti-Kremlin stance has been a thorn in Moscow's side since he came to power in 2018 after massive protests against Russia-backed Armenian leaders. Yerevan is also seeking membership in the European Union.

Moves to strip Armenia of its voting rights in the CSTO amount to a demonstrative whipping, Galiya Ibragimova, a Moldova-based expert on Central Asia, told Al Jazeera. Considering that the other CSTO nations are more dependent on Russia economically or stick to the don't poke the tiger logic, she said, they'll keep mum or watch how a bad student is being whipped in class.

The political gauntlet that Armenia — a nation of 3 million coping with the arrival of more than 100,000 people from Nagorno-Karabakh — threw at Moscow reflects a paradigm shift in the former Soviet Union.

Yerevan's timing for these steps is very useful as Russia is too busy with its war in Ukraine and is to a large extent weakened by Western sanctions and Ukraine's military strikes on Russian economic infrastructure, as well as a looming recession, Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 became another pivotal moment that appeared to show how ineffective the CSTO was, as none of the member states backed Moscow militarily.

Shortly before the Ukraine war erupted, the CSTO flexed its muscles in January 2022, when Russia sent thousands of peacekeepers to several Kazakh cities following massive street protests. But Moscow's reported failures in the Ukraine war turned Russia's political and military might into a myth even Russian officials and military believe in — not to mention CSTO member states, Ibragimova believes.

She said that the Russian weapons CSTO member states can procure are sold as both discounted and yet advanced, but in reality, are very old weapons Russia didn't need.

Meanwhile, the ex-Soviet nations of Central Asia and the South Caucasus find new formats of military interaction. One of them is the Turkiye-led Organization of Turkic States, which includes Azerbaijan and three Central Asian nations.