CSTO Leaders Agree to Set Up Crisis Response Center

From right, Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Bakytzhan Sagintayev, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Nikolai Bordyuzha pose for a photo during a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Yerevan, Armenia, Friday, Oct. 14, 2016. Along with Russia, the Moscow-dominated alliance includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

The leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member-states have decided to set up a joint crisis response center to exchange information on common threats, including terrorism, and make decisions in real time, RFERL/RL reports.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian, who is hosting a meeting of the CSTO summit on October 14 in Yerevan, made the announcement concerning the new response center. Further details were not immediately available.

Sarkisian also said the issue of a new secretary-general of the CSTO will be discussed at a summit of the grouping in Russia’s St. Petersburg at the end of the year.

And he said the members of the CSTO “reaffirmed their commitment to an exclusively peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem.”

During the meeting, the CSTO also adopted documents including agreements on drafting a unified list of terrorist organizations, a collective security strategy for the period till 2025, and a document on measures to counter international terrorism and extremism.

Senior officials from six former Soviet republics, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, are attending the gathering in the Armenian capital.

In addition to heads of state, the foreign ministers and defense ministers of the CSTO’s member states are in Yerevan for the talks.

As leaders gathered in Yerevan, Armenia formally transferred its chairmanship of the CSTO’s Council of Foreign Ministers to Belarus.

The CSTO is a regional security group of former Soviet republics whose members are Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.

Prime Minister Baqytzhan Saghyntaev represented Kazakhstan in place of the 76-year-old President Nursultan Nazarbaev, whose visit to Yerevan was cancelled in advance because of what Nazarbaev’s aides described as “a cold.”

Nazarbaev returned to work at his office in Astana on October 14, three days after official reports said he was being treated for a “cold.”