YEREVAN. Feb 8 (Interfax) - The deployment of a civilian peacekeeping mission of the European Union to Armenia was made possible thanks to the EU's specification of the territory of the country, there is no geopolitical context in the deployment of this mission, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.
"How is it that a [Collective Security Treaty Organization] CSTO mission did not come to Armenia, whereas an EU mission was deployed? Our partners in the CSTO said that this offer remains in effect and we are grateful for it. But in the CSTO's case we formulated a clear task, specifying the CSTO's area of responsibility in Armenia. We have not received a response," Pashinyan said during a government Q&A session at the parliament on Wednesday.
The EU mission was deployed only because the EU clearly defined Armenia's territory during a meeting in Prague, and the mission came to monitor this territory, Pashinyan said.
"Without it, a monitoring mission would be at least odd because if the territory is unknown, how could one decide if it's occupied or not," Pashinyan said.
Prior to the EU's deployment of its mission to Armenia, Azerbaijan "explained at Western venues its aggression against Armenia by the Armenian prime minister's stationing of more and more Russian troops on the border with Azerbaijan and preparing for a joint Armenian-Russian aggression against Azerbaijan," he said.
"In the West, Azerbaijan painted Armenia as a participant of Russia's aggressive policy and in Russia as a participant in a Western plot. And we said, come and perform monitoring for yourself to find out whether these claims are true or not," Pashinyan said.
"There is no geopolitical context" in the deployment of the EU mission to Armenia, "there is a specific agenda, a specific issue we are trying to deal with," he said.