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Lawmakers from post-Soviet security bloc seek to coordinate activities on global stage

A document to coordinate member states’ activities on international platforms has been drawn up, according to the CSTO PA executive secretary

MOSCOW, January 29. /TASS/. The Standing Commission on Political Affairs and International Cooperation and the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO PA) have drawn up a document to coordinate member states’ activities on international platforms, CSTO PA Executive Secretary Sergei Pospelov said at Wednesday’s meeting of the Russian Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) Committee on Defense and Security.

"At the last meeting of the Defense and Security Committee, an instruction was issued at the initiative of Olga Kovitidi [the Committee’s member] and our colleagues from Armenia, Kazakhstan and Belarus that the Secretariat and the Commission on Political Affairs draw up regulations to coordinate CSTO PA member states’ activities on the international stage," Pospelov pointed out. "Such a document has now been drawn up and its draft will be sent to all of the member states’ parliaments," he added.

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Pospelov was hopeful that the document would be adopted before the end of the year. When speaking about the need to develop such a document, he mentioned the last session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA), where CSTO countries failed to vote uniformly.

"The last OSCE PA session considered resolutions that did not reflect the situation in Russia and other CSTO countries in a positive way, and, to put it mildly, the [member] countries did not vote uniformly on those matters," the CSTO PA executive secretary emphasized.

Kovitidi, in turn, noted that she had "faced issues when it came to CSTO countries’ position on Crimea." "We can see that we have problems within the OSCE, as well as within the United Nations. The Warsaw Pact collapsed and now we only have the CSTO. It is our own platform but still there are issues between member states. We need to organize ourselves so that we have consolidated stances on a number of global issues that are important to us. I have already raised the question of changing the CSTO’s charter to make sure we have coordinated positions on international platforms," the senator said.

The CSTO consists of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

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