MOSCOW, March 31. /TASS/. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is fully prepared to dispatch a mission to the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the sake of Armenia’s security, Yury Shuvalov from the CSTO Secretariat said on Friday.
"As for collective security in the Caucasus region, the Organization stands ready to send a CSTO mission to the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the provision of Armenia’s security or render other assistance [to the republic]," Shuvalov told reporters following an expanded meeting at the CSTO headquarters.
According to the official, assistance measures were included in the CSTO Collective Security Council’s draft decision currently being in the works.
On Thursday, Azerbaijan’s top brass said that the republic’s forces had taken control of heights and areas in the Lachin District near the border with Armenia ahead of the commissioning of a new motor road that would connect Karabakh to Armenia.
The conflict between Baku and Yerevan over the highland region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory that had been part of Azerbaijan before the Soviet Union’s break-up, but primarily populated by ethnic Armenians, broke out in February 1988 after the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region announced its withdrawal from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The situation around Nagorno-Karabakh escalated on September 27, 2020 when intense battles erupted there. On the night of November 9, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint statement on the full cessation of hostilities. The sides stopped at their positions at that moment, a number of districts went under Baku’s control, and Russian peacekeepers were deployed at the contact line and at the so-called Lachin corridor.