---
title: "In Moscow, Putin’s military bloc weighs silencing Armenia, the ally that walked away"
description: "The CSTO meets November 11 to weigh stripping Yerevan’s vote over unpaid dues, while Central Asian members drill with other partners"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-10T05:38:50Z
modified: 2026-11-10T16:09:30Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-moscow-putin-s-military-bloc-weighs-silencing-armenia-the-b16270
language: en
tags: ["russia", "armenia", "csto", "ukraine", "azerbaijan", "europe", "asia"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Moscow, Putin’s military bloc weighs silencing Armenia, the ally that walked away

*The CSTO meets November 11 to weigh stripping Yerevan’s vote over unpaid dues, while Central Asian members drill with other partners*

By Jan Sokol · November 10, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-moscow-putin-s-military-bloc-weighs-silencing-armenia-the-b16270

## In brief

- Putin chairs a CSTO Collective Security Council session in Moscow on November 11
- Armenia froze its CSTO participation in February 2024, and Pashinyan says its interest in the bloc has run its course
- Russia’s foreign minister says Armenia owes over two years of dues and the council will consider removing its voting rights
- No CSTO member sent troops to help Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war or backed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine
- Afghanistan, where Russia says up to 23,000 fighters operate, is the summit’s only substantive agenda item

On Wednesday, November 11, Vladimir Putin will take the chair in Moscow at a session of the Collective Security Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO is the military bloc Russia put together from pieces of the Soviet Union, and on paper it binds its members to defend one another. As [Mansur Mirovalev reports for Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/10/moscow-summit-tests-russias-waning-grip-on-former-soviet-allies), the meeting will test something that cannot be counted in tanks: how much pull the old centre still has over the lands that once orbited it.

## The empty chair

The test has a name, and it is Armenia. Yerevan froze its participation in February 2024. It is still a member on paper but stays away from the bloc’s activities, and it accuses the alliance of leaving it alone when it needed help. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, put it plainly last week: Armenia “de facto doesn’t participate in the CSTO’s operations”, and what comes next depends on internal discussions.

Armenia’s prime minister was even plainer. Asked by the state news agency what Armenia would do if the council moved against it, Nikol Pashinyan [said on November 5](https://armenpress.am/en/article/1264873): “our interest in the CSTO has run its course.” A week earlier, on October 28, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan [told reporters](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/eurasia/armenian-foreign-minister-says-his-country-sees-no-possibility-of-returning-to-csto/4103870): “We stopped participating in the work of this structure a long time ago, froze our membership, and we will not change our position. We do not see ourselves returning to the CSTO”.

![An empty round table surrounded by dark chairs stands apart from a single chair bearing red, blue, and orange stripes against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/3fe018b80df0344d8bdd56ecc91dced50b92b564.webp)

Moscow’s answer comes in the language of bookkeeping. On November 10, as ministers and security council secretaries met in Moscow to prepare the summit, a meeting Armenia boycotted, Russia’s foreign minister said Yerevan had not paid its membership fees for more than two years, [according to APA](https://en.apa.az/cis-countries/russian-fm-csto-to-consider-restricting-armenias-voting-rights-tomorrow-535247). For that reason, he said, the council would consider removing its voting rights under Article 25 of the charter. He added that “even after this, all of Armenia’s rights within the CSTO, including the right to security guarantees, will be preserved”, and noted that Armenia has never asked to leave. The bloc’s secretary general, Talatbek Masadykov, said on November 5 that expulsion was not on the table but that the council [could apply Article 25](https://www.pan.am/en/626686).

Here is one way to read it, and it is only a reading: an empire that can no longer command falls back on the ledger. It cannot keep a country, so it sends the country a bill.

## Autumn 2020

The break goes back to the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. The charter promises military aid to a member under attack. None came. Russia sent no troops, and neither did Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, even though Russia keeps two bases in Armenia staffed by thousands of servicemen and border guards. Azerbaijan, which quit the bloc in 1999, fought with Russian weapons it had bought for billions, alongside Turkish and Israeli drones and newer tactics.

![A cream shield with a jagged hole frames an orange house with a red roof against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/71961ea655b130fd8cc99b6de9b3866810a47fd4.webp)

Armenia is a country of about 3 million people. Since that war it has taken in more than 100,000 people from Nagorno-Karabakh. Pashinyan came to power through the 2018 protests against leaders backed by Moscow, the Kremlin regards him as hostile, and his government is now pursuing membership of the European Union.

The guarantee was written down. It was never honoured.

## A demonstrative whipping

Galiya Ibragimova, a Central Asia specialist based in Moldova, calls the move against Armenia’s vote “a demonstrative whipping.” She expects the other members to say nothing, either because their economies depend on Russia or out of the old instinct she sums up as “Don’t poke the tiger.” Yet in her view Russia’s failures in Ukraine have turned its might “into a myth”, and the arms it sells its allies are “very old weapons Russia didn’t need.”

Alisher Ilkhamov of Central Asia Due Diligence in London calls Yerevan’s timing “very useful.” Russia is fighting a war in Ukraine, living under Western sanctions, watching Ukrainian strikes hit its economic infrastructure and facing a possible recession. In his assessment Moscow cannot take “decisive steps” against members that drift away. All it can do is complain.

## Other roads

Armenia is the loudest case of a quieter drift. In January 2022 the bloc sent thousands of peacekeepers into Kazakh cities after mass protests. A month later Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and not one member backed it militarily.

![A black horseshoe magnet with cream, blue, and red tips attracts three cream military helmets against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/d1572f31b83acab02064c6dfd7d2e2a23f84d5f6.webp)

Since then the region’s armies have found other company. The Türkiye-led Organization of Turkic States includes Azerbaijan and three Central Asian countries. In late September thousands of elite Uzbek, Azerbaijani and Turkish troops trained together in Nagorno-Karabakh and on the Caspian coast. In October 2025 Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan held joint drills, with no Russians present.

Uzbekistan, a country of 37 million, has been leaving and returning for decades. It left the bloc in 1999, rejoined in 2006 and suspended its membership in 2012, preferring observer status. Despite Russian hints, Ibragimova says, it never came back. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev keeps both doors open. He has stood at the May 9 Victory Parade in Moscow and joined drills with Russia, and in mid-October he [hosted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio](https://rews.cc/a/rubio-heads-to-samarkand-as-central-asia-seeks-partners-beyo-b33a5c).

## The border to the south

According to Ruslan Suleymanov of the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, the summit has only one substantive item: security in Afghanistan. Russian officials say up to 23,000 fighters from more than 20 armed groups operate there. Suleymanov singles out the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch, ISKP, which he says “actively recruits youngsters from Central Asia, especially Tajikistan.”

ISKP claimed the 2024 attack on a concert hall outside Moscow, which killed more than 140 people, five of them children, and wounded more than 550. This year the CSTO states reinforced the 1,344km (835-mile) border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

So the bloc will meet to discuss a threat its members actually share, at a table where one chair stays empty and the host is preparing to tally what the absent member owes.