Power shift Yerevan snub shows Putin losing grip on regional allies

Armenia has asked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to chair peace talks with Azerbaijan in a fresh challenge to Vladimir Putin's increasingly loose grip on Russia's regional allies in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

- Daniel Boffey

The snub from a traditional ally to Putin, who had hosted an inconsequential meeting of the warring countries' leaders in October, comes on the back of his disastrous summit with six former Soviet states.

During a "family" photograph of leaders of countries in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in Yerevan last week, Armenia's prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, stepped away from Putin, who had been standing to his left.

Pashinyan then refused to sign a summit declaration, as he railed against the recent failures of the CSTO, which ties Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan into a defence agreement.

He expressed frustration at the lack of a response to his formal request for the CSTO to intervene on Armenia's behalf after his country came under attack from across the border with Azerbaijan in September.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in an on-and-off conflict for three decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but largely controlled by the majority ethnic Armenian population.