The two-day summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which opened in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand on September 15, demonstrated that the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has no future, publishes material Global News.
Regional drama
According to its results, in fact, China becomes the main player in Central Asia instead of Russia, which, as Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted, has “concerns and questions” to Russia regarding the war against Ukraine. And it loses in it.
The offensive of the Ukrainian army in the Kharkiv direction has greatly undermined the authority of Putin and the Chinese confidence in the need to help Russia.
Thus, Beijing began to treat Moscow with contempt. At the strategic level, it will continue to talk about partnership with Russia, but will not help to provide weapons or circumvent Western sanctions. Beijing will continue to benefit from the low prices for Russian oil and gas that Moscow offers to its buyers from Asia after cutting off significant energy supplies to Europe.
Russia wanted to consider itself a global political player, and now it is becoming only a raw material appendage of China. It was very unpleasant for Putin when the leaders of the countries present at the summit were deliberately late for a meeting with him.
Even the host country, Uzbekistan, demonstrated its attitude towards the Russian Federation, when not the president, but the prime minister came out to meet Putin at the Samarkand airport. President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev met President Xi Jinping the day before.
The renewed military conflicts between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, caused headaches to the president of the CSTO guarantor country, which raises the question of the appropriateness of an organization where some of its members are fighting among themselves, while others do not receive the necessary military support.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was absent from the summit, precisely due to the senselessness of communicating with the leaders of the CSTO allied countries (primarily Russia), when hostilities are taking place on Armenian territory.
The Last Frontier
Yerevan is dissatisfied with the CSTO’s reaction to the escalation of the military conflict, and that is the United States, not Russia, has played a decisive role in the ceasefire during the recent aggravation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, the Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Alen Simonyan said.
Putin came to the summit already a loser, but left also humiliated.
He planned to create a multipolar world in which Russia is one of the poles, but it turned out that it is already in the margins, including among the countries of Asia. Putin failed to achieve any significant preferences for the Russian Federation. Even vice versa. At the summit site, they agreed to create a transport corridor from China to Europe through Central and Asia Minor (Turkey) bypassing Russia. In the SCO, Russia is assigned a secondary role, which marks the beginning of the end of the CSTO and the emerging trend of China’s leadership in Central Asia. A similar fate awaits the Russian Federation and the BRICS.
Evhen Tsybulenko