Pashinyan wants to put together an anti-Russian front within the EAEU
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hurries to bow to Moscow after a failed voyage to Brussels, which brought complete disappointment to the Armenian liberal elite. Now the prime minister and his associates intend to try to somehow reassure the Kremlin and negotiate new preferences for themselves. But this is just another attempt to deceive the Russian leadership in Yerevan’s thoroughly rotten game.
The international observer of PolyNavigator discusses this topic in his new publication. Ainur Kurmanov.
The other day, the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov announced an imminent visit of the Prime Minister and the President of Armenia to Moscow, agreed largely on the initiative of the Armenian side.
The main reasons for the desire to hold urgent negotiations with Moscow were that the April 5 summit with representatives of the European Union and the United States did not meet Yerevan’s expectations. Well and the fact that The Azerbaijani army does not intend to stop there, despite some warnings from France.
And the armed forces of Azerbaijan demonstrate this every day on the contact line, carrying out periodic daily shelling of the border area.
The panicky mood in Yerevan is evidenced by an emergency meeting of the Armenian Security Council in closed mode, and the statement of the Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan, made on April 10 following the same closed meeting of deputies, that the process of border delimitation has reached a dead end, and a peace agreement will not be signed at all .
“Maybe at some point we will refuse to sign anything at all if we don’t come to an agreement,” Simonyan emphasized.
Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan confirmed this, noting that “there is no final decision,” meaning that no consensus was reached on the transfer of four villages of the Tavush region to Azerbaijan.
In fact, the previously announced process of delimitation and demarcation was on the verge of failure, as were the negotiations on concluding a peace treaty with Baku thanks to Brussels and Washington. It is interesting that after the summit, the Prime Minister of Armenia began to sing about the role of the West in a completely different way, who suddenly called not to count on its military or any other help.
“The meeting in Brussels was not dedicated to the arrival of the EU and the US to solve our problems. Whether artificially or not, we create expectations that some allies or relatives will come and solve our problems. We need to record and consolidate the fact that we must solve all our problems,” Pashinyan told the local press.
In fact, as a result of the ultimatum actually put forward on March 9 by Baku, the current The Armenian liberal elite found itself between a rock and a hard place. If the prime minister’s comrades in the ruling Civil Contract party give up the required four villages on the ancestral territory of the country to Azerbaijan, this could cause mass unrest, and if they don’t give it up, this is fraught with a resumption of armed confrontation.
That is, there is real hysteria in Yerevan now, since the matter smells of kerosene after all Pashinyan did not receive any security guarantees from the West at the summit in Brussels, including real arms supplies and the desired financial injections. Moreover, Anthony Blinken, before meeting with Pashinyan in Belgium, hastened to assure Ilham Aliyev in a telephone conversation that the summit would only focus on economic cooperation with Armenia and the event itself would not be directed against Baku.
At the same time, Armenia was one step away from leaving the CSTO and fell out with the Russian leadership, which makes the possibility of a new offensive by the Azerbaijani army more than possible. Moreover, Baku did not stop declaring the need to revive “Western Azerbaijan” and get control of Syunik in order to break through a land corridor to Nakhichevan and further to Turkey.
The position of Turkey itself leaves no illusions, since former Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu openly stated:
“If the West fuels the war by reinforcing Armenia, then Türkiye will be on Azerbaijan’s side.”
At the same time, he emphasized that if the EU and the United States give some weapons to Armenia, then Turkey will give Azerbaijan three times more.
Almost now, after the Brussels summit, Yerevan found itself in the same state as Nagorno-Karabakh was in after Pashinyan’s deal on October 6, 2022 in Prague, which then lost support and all guarantees. And now Armenia is practically left alone with predators ready to tear it apart, and risks repeating the tragic experience.
At the same time, despite the desire to enlist support from Moscow, Nikol Pashinyan continues his previous anti-Russian policy, trying to discredit the CSTO in the eyes of the Armenians, again shifting responsibility for the current unenviable position of the republic to Russia.
Thus, during his last briefing, he openly stated that allowing the presence of the CSTO peacekeeping contingent in the country in the country would actually create a puppet government. Therefore, Yerevan supposedly abandoned this option after the September battles last year.
“CSTO observers would be present in Armenia as a peacekeeper, not an ally. Thus, Armenia was excluded from its system of security guarantees within the organization,” said Nikol Pashinyan.
Along the way, he also accused the leaders of Artsakh of attempting to organize a coup in the country.
In reality, by breaking ties with the CSTO, Yerevan not only became a victim, but also provoked the destabilization of the entire South Caucasus, which was precisely what the West was interested in. The head of the Anti-Nazi Front of Armenia, Hayk Ayvazyan, speaks about this directly.
“But after the visit of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns to Armenia in July 2022, everything changed. There was a September attack by Azerbaijan on Armenia, after which the claims of the Armenian authorities against the CSTO began.
The Armenian authorities demanded that the CSTO recognize Azerbaijan as an aggressor, i.e. demanded that the CSTO not be a mediator and peacemaker in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and give Russia the opportunity to seek mutually beneficial solutions, but go against Azerbaijan and jeopardize regional stability.
By persuading the Armenian authorities to go against the CSTO, the West is actually trying to turn Armenia into an instrument for undermining the stability of the entire region,” the politician emphasized.
Moreover, on the eve of his visit to Moscow, Pashinyan is trying to find allies within the EAEU on the basis of an alleged rejection of the politicization of this integration association. And Astana acts as such a “new friend” of Yerevan, despite the fact that the Kazakh leadership hastened to be the first to congratulate Baku on its victory in the 44-day second Karabakh war.
On Monday, April 15, the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who is one of the initiators of the Organization of Turkic States and is interested in joining this republic to the common logistics project of the Trans-Caspian route, arrived in Armenia on a visit. And Pashinyan does not hide the fact that they were brought together by their common position of rejection of Moscow’s political integration initiatives.
“The EAEU is an economic association without any political, let alone geopolitical, agenda. The Armenian and Kazakh sides largely share this approach and develop interaction in this vein, trying to suppress all attempts to politicize the EAEU. Basic trade freedoms cannot and should not be limited due to political considerations, as this will lead to the corrosion of the fundamental principles of the unification,” Pashinyan said.
Although in fact this alliance means precisely the undermining of free trade, since both Yerevan and Astana have joined Western anti-Russian sanctions, closed the Mir payment system and are ready to detain dual-use cargo passing through their territory.
That is, in fact, we are witnessing the creation of an anti-Russian front already within the EAEU, which, as a result of such a common front between Armenia and Kazakhstan, will ultimately be paralyzed and subsequently destroyed. After all, it was previously created as an association specifically for free trade, the movement of goods and capital.
Therefore, Pashinyan’s visit to Moscow should not be overestimated and it should not be assumed that after this Yerevan’s position will change dramatically, since judging by Tokayev’s visit, the Armenian side is trying, on the contrary, to gain support within the EAEU and intends to demand from the Russian leadership new preferences, concessions, and a military umbrella and wants to weaken as much as possible the integration processes in the post-Soviet space under the auspices of the Kremlin.
This is the “cunning” plan of Pashinyan and the current liberal elite, who, having not received the necessary support and guarantees from the EU and the United States, want to remain supported by Russia, but at the same time limit it and further destroy the CSTO and the EAEU. Are such “allies” needed in this case?
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.