Armenian representative appointed as CSTO Secretary General

Yuri Khachaturov will officially assume the post of Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on 2 May 2017 and will be leading the organization for three years.

The candidacy of Yuri Khachaturov was proposed and adopted unanimously by the CSTO leaders during the informal meeting in Bishkek.

Colonel-General Yuri Khachaturov served as Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, and Deputy Defense Minister of Armenia as of 2008. In 2016, he was appointed Secretary of the National Security Council of Armenia.

A representative of Armenia was supposed to take up the post of CSTO Secretary General in 2016 in accordance with the ‘rotating presidency’ system, in which the country leading the CSTO has to alternate annually. However, the matter of approving the CSTO Secretary General had repeatedly been postponed – first, at the CSTO summit in Yerevan in October 2016 due to the absence of the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, then again at a CSTO summit in St. Petersburg in December, due to the absence of the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.

Armenian experts considered this a demarche by the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus. The experts think this was done due to the fact that Azerbaijan expressed its concern regarding the appointment of one of the Armenian generals to the post of the CSTO Secretary General.