Yerevan Walks, Belgrade Hedges, Tbilisi Reopens a Line — the CSTO Dies Quietly

The secretary-general of Russia's own military alliance said the quiet part out loud this morning. Armenia, Taalatbek Masadykov told a Moscow wire, has de facto already withdrawn from the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The documents still circulate. The reports are still read. The Armenians, he said, do not object to decisions being taken without them — which is a diplomat's way of saying they have stopped pretending the room exists.

This is the moment to name the decision-maker, and the decision-maker here is not Masadykov. He is the undertaker, not the executioner. The executioner is Nikol Pashinyan, who told his own parliament he would be pleased if Armenia were expelled, and that the country's interest in the alliance had run its course. A prime minister who publicly invites his own expulsion from a security pact has already made his security arrangements elsewhere. The question is only whether Moscow pays the fee of formalising it or lets the thing rot in place. Masadykov's statement suggests the Kremlin has chosen rot. Rot is cheaper. Rot keeps the letterhead.

Now look sideways. In Belgrade, Aleksandar Vucic — who resigned the presidency last month and is running his party's list into Sunday's snap vote — went on television to promise two things: no sanctions on Russia, and no recognition of Kosovo. Both lines are older than this campaign, but their packaging matters. Vucic is not promising the Kremlin anything new. He is promising the Serbian electorate that nothing will be traded, by him, in either direction. That is not a pro-Russia pledge. It is a sovereignty pledge aimed at voters who have watched smaller neighbours get sorted into camps and do not want to be sorted. The distinction is the whole story.

And in Tbilisi, the Georgian Dream government has quietly put a serving first deputy foreign minister into the dormant post of Special Representative for Relations with Russia. The post was created in 2012 as a humanitarian-and-trade side door after the 2008 war severed formal ties. It has been vacant since last December. Filling it with a sitting senior diplomat — not a retired envoy, not a cultural figure — is the move former Georgian diplomats are reading, correctly in my view, as a widening of the mandate under the cover of continuity. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze insists nothing has changed. The reality, as he himself phrased it, is that the barrier to restoring diplomatic relations "has not changed." Note the verb. Not "will not change." Has not. Yet.

Three capitals, three different registers, one pattern: the post-Soviet security order is no longer being renegotiated at the table. It is being renegotiated at the counter, one bilateral transaction at a time, with Moscow accepting worse terms in exchange for keeping the architecture nominally alive. Armenia exits without exiting. Serbia refuses to join a sanctions regime it was never going to join, and extracts an electoral premium for saying so. Georgia reopens a diplomatic channel it never fully closed, under a job title designed in a calmer decade.

The incentive structure is doing the work. For small and middle states on Russia's periphery or in its cultural orbit, the cost of formal alignment with Moscow has risen — sanctions exposure, European market access, visa regimes. The cost of formal confrontation has also risen — energy, security, the sheer unpredictability of a neighbour at war. The sweet spot is the uncoordinated bilateral accommodation: enough distance to satisfy Brussels on the days Brussels is looking, enough contact to keep Moscow from making an example of you. The CSTO as a collective instrument cannot survive this logic, because collective instruments require members to accept costs on behalf of other members. Nobody is in that mood.

The historical rhyme worth naming is the long twilight of the Warsaw Pact's final years, when member states were still technically bound but had privately begun running their own foreign policies through back channels in Vienna, Helsinki, and Belgrade. The structure held on paper for years after it had stopped meaning anything in practice. Where this rhyme fails: the Warsaw Pact dissolved into a vacuum that another bloc rushed to fill. There is no equivalent rushing bloc here. Armenia is not joining anything. Serbia is not joining anything. Georgia's European path is, at best, suspended. What replaces the CSTO is not another alliance. It is a mosaic of two-way deals, each one legible only to its signatories.

My reading is that Moscow has made peace with this, because the alternative — forcing the issue, expelling Armenia formally, pressuring Belgrade publicly, demanding Tbilisi choose — would convert a soft dependency into a hard rupture. The Kremlin's budget, as opposed to its rhetoric, is being spent on keeping the lights on in bilateral channels, not on reviving a multilateral one. That is a confession of weakness dressed as patience.

I would revise this reading if, within the next months, Moscow moves to formally expel Armenia under Article 25, or if Belgrade's post-election government reverses on sanctions, or if the Georgian Special Representative post is publicly rolled back. None of those look likely from where I sit. But prophecy ages badly, so I will stop there.