“Pashinyan must go,” one middle-aged demonstrator informed POLITICO, saying he most popular to not give his identify as he feared reprisals. Requested who ought to take his place as prime minister, or how one other chief would keep away from battle with Azerbaijan whereas nonetheless holding the 4 villages, the demonstrator stated: “Another person can have a greater plan.”
Pashinyan has hailed the give up of the 4 villages as a significant step towards normalizing relations with Azerbaijan — the 2 nations have fought usually because the fall of the USSR in 1991 — and respecting its worldwide authorized obligations. “We’re reproducing the [legal] borders … on the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he stated final week.
Earlier the identical day, officers in Yerevan and Moscow confirmed that Russian border guards — stationed alongside Armenia’s frontiers with Azerbaijan because the Nineties — had been requested to depart their posts and start withdrawing.
In recent times, Armenia has frozen its membership within the Russian-led CSTO army alliance, which refused its requires help when Azerbaijan launched an offensive in opposition to the nation in September 2022.
Beneath Pashinyan’s management, the nation has as a substitute held joint drills with U.S. forces, dispatched humanitarian support to Ukraine, and even hinted it may in the future apply for membership within the EU. Armenia’s opposition events have been important of the nation’s pivot to the West, claiming historic ally Russia would in any other case defend their pursuits — regardless of the Kremlin rising more and more deferential to Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey because the begin of the battle in Ukraine.
Russian peacekeepers additionally didn’t intervene when Azerbaijani troops and tanks rolled into the breakaway area of Nagorno-Karabakh final September. The mountainous area is inside Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized borders, however had been managed by Armenia since a battle within the Nineties. The sudden invasion, which adopted an virtually year-long blockade of the area’s provide traces, triggered the exodus of round 100,000 ethnic Armenian residents.
“The mannequin by which now we have issues with our neighbors and now we have to ask others to guard us — it doesn’t matter who these others are — is a really susceptible mannequin,” Pashinyan informed POLITICO final 12 months, whereas vowing to resolve Armenia’s long-standing and bitter strife with Azerbaijan.
