Starting from from January 1, 2020, the post of CSTO Secretary General will be taken by the representative of Belarus — the current State Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus Stanislau Zas, Interfax reports with reference to the Acting Secretary General of the CSTO Valery Semerikov.
On the sidelines of the MILEX exhibition in Minsk, Valery Semerikov said that the final decision on this will be taken by the CSTO foreign ministers at the CSTO session in Bishkek next week.
“From January 1, 2020, the turn to fill in the post of general secretary will come to Belarus,” Semerikov said. “Today this post should be occupied by the representative of Armenia, but due to force majeure, the final decision on the appointment of the secretary general will be taken on May”.
Last year, Armenia recalled its representative Yuri Khachaturov, who became the CSTO Secretary General in April 2017, in connection with a criminal case on the bloody crackdown on an opposition demonstration in 2008.
Stanislau Zas was born in Ukraine, he graduated from the Baku Higher All-Arms Command School, the Military Academy of Belarus and the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia.
After that, the former president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, following the results of the session of the Collective Security Council of the CSTO, stated that the representative of Belarus should be elected as the next secretary general after Armenia. This information was later confirmed by Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Yerevan, however, insisted that the position of the CSTO Secretary General should be filled by a representative of Armenia until 2020.
The CSTO includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
