ArmInfo. Armenia's candidate for CSTO Secretary General position will be approved at the upcoming summit of the organization, Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian stated at the press conference in Yerevan.
The Minister noted that the date of the summit will be soon decided. "CSTO Secretariat has already held a meeting and taken a decision that Armenia's representative should become the Secretary General of the organization", he noted adding that this document was sent to the foreign ministries of the member countries for approval.
He also stated that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko did not participate in the last session of CSTO in Saint Petersburg not because he is against the Armenian candidate for the position. "His was absent for quite another reason", Nalbandian stressed.
To recall, CSTO Deputy Secretary General Valery Semerikov became the Acting CSTO Secretary General on 1 Jan 2017, according to the official statement posted on the CSTO's website. To note, earlier it was decided to make the CSTO Secretary General's mandate rotating - once every three years in the alphabetical order. During the CSTO Collective Security Council's meeting in Yerevan on 14 Oct 2016, the participants were to name the Secretary General from Armenia. However, on October 14, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said that the issue of the CSTO Secretary General was removed from the agenda due to the absence of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. He added that the heads of the CSTO member states would consider that issue at a meeting in St. Petersburg in Dec 2016. However, this issue was not addressed in St. Petersburg either due to the absence of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.