Lavrov visit to Armenia to focus on Karabakh

Lavrov visit to Armenia to focus on Karabakh –

Armenianow – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is visiting Armenia today. In Yerevan he is due to meet with President Serzh Sargsyan and hold a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian. 

The last time Lavrov was in Yerevan was on June 22-23 and before that he came together with Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend the events on April 24 dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

In reply to Russia’s news agency, Tass, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that during the Monday visit Lavrov is going to discuss “a wide range of international and regional problems.” However, even experienced analysts refrain from prediction as to what specifically the Russian minister is going to discuss with officials in Yerevan. 

The most obvious subject is the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. In particular, experts note that in September Lavrov visited Azerbaijan and, as they suggested afterwards, tried to discuss the “settlement” of the Karabkah conflict with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. In particular, experts say that the option of the deployment of Russian peacekeepers along a new line of contact in Karabakh was considered, with a number of currently Karabakh-held areas to be ostensibly given to Azerbaijan in exchange for its accession to the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Russia turned out to be almost the only country that supported the victory of Aliyev’s ruling party in the November 1 parliamentary elections. Western organizations, in fact, did not recognize the elections, and the OSCE/ODIHR had refused to send its observers to Azerbaijan. In contrast, Putin congratulated Aliyev on his convincing victory.

Anti-Western rhetoric is more and more loudly being voiced in Azerbaijan. One of Azerbaijani lawmakers Samad Seyidov said that Azerbaijan has taken the fight against the Western system, which he claimed tried to reshape the world in its own way and change governments in other countries. In this sense, Azerbaijan and Russia are natural allies, but Russia needs something to fix this alliance with, and a deal on Nagorno-Karabakh may become the “glue”.

But Karabakh is unlikely to be the only topic of discussions during Lavrov’s visit to Yerevan. Last week Armenia hosted Speaker of the Federation Council of Russia Valentina Matviyenko, who expressed the need to strengthen Armenian-Russian relations. 

Amid her visit, the Gallup International Association published the results of a poll commissioned by the Eurasian Development Bank, according to which 54.4 percent of the Armenian population favored the country’s becoming part of Russia.

Judging by the way the question was formulated, this is exactly how in Moscow they see “strengthening of Armenian-Russian relations” – abolition the country’s sovereignty and its entry into the empire. This can be in the form of some format of “close integration” or “union state”, but it is obvious that Armenia’s participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union does not seem sufficient to Moscow anymore.