“Uzbekistan’s Foreign Ministry reported that it was inexpedient to take part in the session of the Council of CSTO Foreign Ministers. It proposed to organise the meeting ahead of the CSTO Council session slated for June,” the press service said.

According to it, the foreign ministers of certain CSTO countries wanted to meet in Armenia. “They took this decision because the CSTO key documents envisioned sessions of CSTO bodies - the Council of Foreign Ministers, the Council of Defence Ministers and the Committee of Secretaries of the Security Councils,” the press service said.

The foreign ministers will focus on foreign political cooperation, international security, on the state of and prospects for the CSTO activity in Afghanistan, as well as on interaction with international and regional organisations such as with the U.N. and the OSCE.

The ministers will also discuss proposals worked out by the Council of Defence Ministers and the Committee of Secretaries of the Security Councils to step up the Organisation’s military components and counteract challenges and threats posed to security, as well as intermediary results to create collective rapid reaction forces.

The CSTO involves Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It was created on the basis of the Collective Security Treaty of the May 15, 1992, which was turned into an international organisation on May 14, 2002. The CSTO received the status of observer at the U.N. General Assembly on December 2, 2004.

The purpose of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation is to guarantee the national security of each of its members and to ensure their territorial integrity. In case of a menace, looming over any member-country, all the other CSTO participants will be duty-bound to give it all the necessary aid, including military assistance. The military-political relations among the CSTO nations hold supremacy over their military relations and contacts with third countries, which are not CSTO members.

The Treaty’s overall system of collective security includes some regional subsystems, acting in three directions: in the European direction (the Russo-Belarus military group) and in the Caucasian direction (the Russian-Armenian group).