Moscow Summit Exposes Russia's Slipping Grip on Ex-Soviet Allies

Vladimir Putin takes the chair of the Collective Security Council of the Collective Security Treaty Organization on Wednesday, but one seat at the table is effectively empty. Armenia froze its participation in the Russia-dominated military bloc in February 2024 and has not taken part in its activities since. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged last week that Armenia is not involved, telling reporters: what happens next depends on the nature of the discussions inside the organisation.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan went further on November 5, saying plainly that Armenia's interest in the CSTO has run its course. Yerevan's anger dates to the 2020 war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, when neither Russia nor fellow members Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan sent troops to help, despite a charter that envisages exactly that. Moscow still keeps two military bases in Armenia staffed by thousands of servicemen and border guards.

Azerbaijan, which quit the CSTO in 1999, had bought billions of dollars of Russian weaponry, then won the war with Turkish and Israeli drones and a rewritten playbook built on recent advances in military technology. Pashinyan has been a thorn in the Kremlin's side since sweeping to power in 2018 on protests against Russia-backed leaders, and Yerevan is now chasing European Union membership. The country of 3 million is also absorbing more than 100,000 people who fled Nagorno-Karabakh.

Moves to strip Armenia of its CSTO voting rights amount to a demonstrative whipping, Galiya Ibragimova, a Moldova-based expert on Central Asia, told Al Jazeera. She predicted other members, more economically dependent on Russia or following a don't-poke-the-tiger logic, will keep mum or watch how a bad student is whipped in class. Russia's reported failures in Ukraine, she added, have turned its military might into a myth even Russian officials believe in.

Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera that Yerevan's timing is useful because Russia is too busy with its war in Ukraine, weakened by sanctions, Ukrainian strikes on its economic infrastructure and a looming recession. None of the CSTO states backed Moscow militarily after the 2022 full-scale invasion, though the bloc did deploy thousands of peacekeepers to Kazakh cities in January 2022. Moscow has also failed to lure Uzbekistan, a nation of 37 million, back in.

The region is building new formats without Russia: the Turkiye-led Organization of Turkic States includes Azerbaijan and three Central Asian nations, and in late September elite troops from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkiye trained in Nagorno-Karabakh and on the Caspian shore to seize ships, drop paratroopers and run drone attacks. Ruslan Suleymanov of the New Eurasian Strategies Centre told Al Jazeera the only real agenda item in Moscow is Afghanistan, where Russian officials warn up to 23,000 fighters from more than 20 armed groups operate. ISKP, which claimed the 2024 Moscow concert hall attack that killed more than 140 people and wounded over 550, recruits heavily from Tajikistan, and CSTO states have boosted security along the 1,344km Afghan-Tajik border.