Moscow said Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is being pressured by Western powers to cede land to Azerbaijan, blaming the Armenian leader for scaring his own population about a potential war as he moves his country closer to the European Union and Western allies.
“Scaring one’s own population is hardly the best way to achieve a favorable result for Armenia,” said Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova at a press briefing Wednesday, saying that Russia should not be blamed if Pashinyan decided to advance Armenia’s relations with the West.
She said Pashinyan has been making “unilateral solutions to contentious territorial issues” under Western pressure.
“These matters need to be resolved calmly, constructively, there is a mechanism for this; it is the Armenian-Azerbaijani border delimitation commission. We are ready to help with this work, taking into account our experience. Within the framework of this structure, work should be done on the basis of the aforementioned principles,” said Zakharova.
The Russia spokesperson intimated that the framework agreed upon by the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia for the delimitation and demarcation of the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan does not envision territorial concessions by Armenia.
Zakharova went on to accuse the Western powers, especially NATO, of hijacking Moscow’s efforts to mediate a peaceful solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.
She said this week’s visit by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to Yerevan and Baku was an attempt to “pull the South Caucasus countries” into the Western alliances of zone of influence.
“Such attempts have been carried out for a long time and on a regular basis both by NATO supporters and NATO member states individually. The recent visit of a NATO official of such level confirms that this activity has increased in that direction, and has increased many times over,” added Zakharova, saying that the fact that Armenia, Azerbaijan and other countries are engaged in relations with Russia is not convenient for the West.
“Hence the continuous attempts by NATO and its supporter, the European Union, to promote the deterioration of the relations of regional states—both with each other and with Moscow—to aggravate the situation along our southern borders,” Zakharova said.
“Of course there is also a maximized effort to open a second front against our country in the Caucasus and to set the region on fire again,” she added.
“The agreements that were reached [between Armenia and Azerbaijan] with the mediation of Russia are literally a red rag for the West because it was truly a path leading to peace, based on mutual respect and mutual consideration of each other’s interests,” Zakharova said, adding that NATO and its allies are aiming to ultimately end relations between Yerevan and Moscow and are driving a wedge in Moscow’s relations with Baku.
Zakharova said that the EU and NATO are “seizing the agenda,” and blamed them for the recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh where their approaches “ignored the need to preserve the rights and security of the local Armenian population.”
She went on to accuse the EU Monitoring Mission in Armenia of spying on Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran. This scenario, she said, “could lead to irreversible consequences in the region.”
