The Fact Investigation Platform has published a report, refuting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allegations that Armenia expected the CSTO’s assistance in Azerbaijan’s war against Nagorno-Karabakhk in 2020.

The CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) is a Russia-led security bloc of which Armenia is a member.

Putin on Thursday, November 28 dismissed Yerevan’s strong criticism of the CSTO. He spoke to journalists right after a CSTO summit in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana boycotted by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.

“I think that the current situation with the CSTO is most likely dictated by internal political processes in Armenia itself, and, of course, all this is connected with the consequences of the crisis in Karabakh,” he said, commenting on the boycott. “I want to stress that the CSTO has nothing to do with that.”

“What happened has nothing to do with the CSTO because there was no external aggression against Armenia itself,” he said. “The CSTO is supposed to defend its member states against external aggression.”

“The events in Karabakh have their own specificities: Armenia did not recognize Karabakh as an independent state and certainly did not include Karabakh in its perimeter. This means that everything that happened in Karabakh has no legal relation to Armenia. So it’s kind of strange to expect the CSTO to fight on the territory of this enclave,” added Putin.

The Fact Investigation Platform, however, has examined official Yerevan's statements during and after the 44-day war of 2020 to determine the veracity of Putin's statements.

According to the platform, the Armenian side has never officially demanded or asked the CSTO for its units to support the Armenian side in Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time, there is no evidence in open sources that Yerevan had such expectations from the CSTO during the 44-day war.

Instead, Armenia requested military assistance from the CSTO during the Azerbaijani attack on the sovereign territory of Armenia in 2022.

Back then CSTO and the top leadership of a number of member states not only did not recognize Baku's aggression against a member state, noting that the fighting took place in disputed territories, but also gave various excuses for not responding to Armenia's request for help.

After the aggression, Yerevan's appeal went unanswered, and only weeks later did the then CSTO Secretary General Stanislav Zas call the Azerbaijani incursion a "border incident," noting that "no decision was made to create a CSTO observer group."

Moreover, the organization did not respond to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's proposal to deploy an observation mission on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in July of the same year.

Thus, Armenia asked for help from the CSTO not during the 44-day war, but during Azerbaijan’s September aggression against Armenian territory in 2022, to which the organization did not respond.