Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has accepted the invitation from the Russian side and will attend the BRICS summit in Kazan next month. Some commentators in Yerevan considered the decision of the head of the Armenian government to be unexpected.
The Transcaucasian republic has already made it clear that it does not aspire to join an alliance of large economies as an alternative to Western clubs. Moreover, the Armenian leadership’s “track record” of boycotting meetings of integration associations in the post-Soviet space is well known. First of all, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, whose membership Armenia has actually frozen.
Pashinyan’s decision to attend the Kazan summit, scheduled for October 22-24, was announced last week by representatives of the Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was also stated that Armenia is preparing to participate in the informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States in May next year, when commemorative events dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War will be held in Moscow. Whether Pashinyan will be present at the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the CIS, scheduled for October 8 this year according to the schedule of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth, officials in Yerevan are still silent.
One way or another, we can see signs that the Armenian authorities are reconsidering their partial boycott of the CIS. At the same time, they have not yet observed any signs of a “thaw” in relation to the CSTO.
BRICS is, of course, a different story. But the arrival of Nikol Pashinyan in the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan is important, where the presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan are also expected to arrive. There is an interesting opportunity for informal communication between the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey at the summit venue. However, before its opening an agreement can still be reached to hold a separate meeting between Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev on the path of the two countries towards the conclusion of a peace treaty. Moscow’s activation of the Transcaucasian diplomatic track leads to this assumption.
The President of Russia paid a state visit to Baku on 18-19 August. A few days later, at the initiative of the Russian side, a telephone conversation took place. Vladimir Putin and Nikol Pashinyan, during which Moscow’s readiness to intensively assist in the settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan was confirmed. Based on the results of his communication with Putin, Pashinyan later noted Armenia’s preference for conducting business with Azerbaijan in a direct bilateral mode, which, as the Prime Minister stressed then, has already proven its effectiveness.
The long-awaited contact between Armenia and Azerbaijan at the highest political level in Kazan will precede another opportunity to achieve a breakthrough in the process of normalizing their relations. Azerbaijan previously sent an invitation to Armenia to participate in the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), scheduled for November 11-22 in Baku. It seems extremely unlikely that Nikol Pashinyan would personally accept this invitation. Even if an unexpected breakthrough in the negotiations occurs in the remaining time and the parties reach the goal of concluding peace, the visit of the Armenian leader to the Azerbaijani capital still seems like a grand political fantasy. However, positive developments are possible in Kazan, which will provide additional grounds for optimism.
It is noteworthy that in June 2011 the summit between Armenia and Azerbaijan was held in the main city of Tatarstan. Then Armenia (represented by former President Serzh Sargsian) and Azerbaijan failed to reach agreements in principle, although they came close to achieving it. As you know, Ilham Aliyev refused at the last moment to approve the plan for resolving the Karabakh conflict, which was accepted by the Armenian side. Now Yerevan and Baku can try again and achieve results in Kazan.
Some Armenian experts previously suggested Pashinyan’s intention to abandon the boycott of meetings in the CIS and other integration associations. Their current leader cannot indefinitely succumb to emotions and feel resentment towards his allies for their “inaction” in matters of military-political support for Armenia. Sooner or later you will have to abandon impulsiveness in your statements and actions, moving on to strictly following the interests of the state. A boycott, by definition, cannot strengthen Armenia’s national security; on the contrary, it is fraught with weakening. Therefore, the upcoming BRICS and COP29 summits can be considered as a kind of intermediate stage in Armenia’s return to Commonwealth circles with its partners from the former USSR.
Some recent steps taken by the Republican authorities also seem to be consistent with Armenia’s conciliatory logic in order to strengthen relations with Russia, which in recent years has suffered from a fundamental imbalance. As is known, last year Yerevan joined the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which provoked a harsh reaction from Moscow, which could not react otherwise to the “arrest” order previously issued against the Russian head of state by this court based in The Hague. New circumstances have emerged this month.
Armenia has not signed the Council of Europe declaration adopted on September 5, in which members of this organisation supported the issuance of an ICC warrant for the “arrest” of President Vladimir Putin. This explanation was made last Friday by the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the republic.
On the day the first version of this declaration was published, 43 countries were listed as signatories, including Armenia and Georgia. However, adjustments were subsequently made on the Council of Europe website and, according to the final version of the document, Armenia is not among the countries that signed it.
The statement indicates “strong support for the International Criminal Court’s investigation aimed at bringing to justice those who have committed international crimes within its jurisdiction on the territory of Ukraine.” At the same time, it calls on all states “to assist the ICC in cooperating with its investigation and bringing those responsible to justice” and also “affirms the need to create an effective special court for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.”
Another escalation of Western efforts to “bring” representatives of the Russian leadership to international criminal responsibility occurred against the backdrop of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia on September 2-3. It is, along with 124 other countries, a member of the ICC.
Following the visit, EU officials regretted that Mongolia, a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC, “has not complied with its obligations to execute the arrest warrant (of Vladimir Putin) in accordance with the statute,” said the bloc’s press secretary. Pedro Stano He said the EU expresses “its strongest support for efforts to achieve full accountability for war crimes and other more serious crimes in connection with Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Thus, Armenia has distanced itself from another hostile attack by the West against Russia, making it clear that it has no intention of getting involved in any confrontational plans of an anti-Russian nature. It is possible that Vladimir Putin will eventually visit Yerevan itself, so the Armenian side’s support for such statements will actually lead it into a political and legal dead end: a country party to the Rome Statute, which declares the need to create some kind of “effective special courts” for Ukraine, does not take appropriate procedural action against a person whose “arrest” is sought by the ICC.
However, this step does not mean that the leaders of the Transcaucasian republic are revising their foreign policy course, which remains, if not hostile, then to put it mildly, not entirely friendly to Russia. So Pashinyan’s strong statements a year ago are fresh in my memory.
During his address to his fellow citizens on September 24, the Prime Minister noted that the events of recent years have demonstrated the “ineffectiveness” of the security structures that include Armenia and that there are “serious doubts also about the goals and motives of the activities of the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh.” According to Pashinyan, although Armenia has never abandoned its allied obligations and has never betrayed its allies, “an analysis of the events shows that the security systems and allies that we have relied on for many years have set themselves the task of exposing our vulnerability and justifying the impossibility of the Armenian people having an independent state.” The Prime Minister further called on the country’s citizens to make a choice: support independence or become a “remote and frightened province.”
A kind of culmination of his hostility towards Russia was his speech on October 17, 2023 from the rostrum of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. The Armenian leader then stated that “Armenia’s security allies publicly called for the overthrow of the democratic government of the republic.” According to him, democracy in Armenia has received and continues to receive “powerful blows that follow an almost exactly repeated formula.” Pashinyan presented it as follows: “external aggression, then inaction of Armenia’s allies in the security sphere, then attempts to use the military or humanitarian situation, or an external security threat to undermine Armenia’s democracy and sovereignty, which are expressed in provoking internal instability through the use of hybrid technologies targeting external forces.”
Returning to the topic of the agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, we can confidently assume that Pashinyan will definitely not go to Baku for COP29. But it is quite possible to appoint there the representation of Armenia at the level of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the republic. A visit in November to the capital of Azerbaijan by the chief Armenian negotiator on the issue of concluding a peace treaty would seem to be a convincing confirmation by Yerevan of its determination to achieve a quick result in direct dialogue with Baku. Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan and his Azerbaijani colleague Jeyhun Bayramov “pulling” their republics towards peace with varying degrees of success. Elements of stagnation have recently appeared in these negotiations, so the proposed meeting of ministers in Baku will, in itself, give a new impetus to the peace process.
