Rejecting strong criticism from Russia, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Monday that he was right not to object to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statement made during last week’s European Political Community summit in Yerevan.
Zelenskyy implicitly threated to disrupt Russia’s upcoming Victory Day parade in Moscow with drone strikes when he addressed the May 4 summit attended by dozens of European leaders,
“They cannot afford military equipment — and they fear drones may buzz over Red Square,” he said of Moscow’s scaled-back celebration of the 81st anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned Zelenskyy’s “terrorist” threats and Pashinian’s failure to respond to them. It summoned the Armenian ambassador in Moscow, Gurgen Arsenian, on Thursday to deplore “the absence of an appropriate negative reaction from official Yerevan.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added his voice to the criticism over the weekend.
“The European Political Community summit is a multilateral platform whose venue does not matter,” countered Pashinian. “This event was as much my event as it was the event of our other partners. I don’t think that I, as the head of the government of the host country, should censor or necessarily respond to everything.”
“There have been times when the president of the Russian Federation made statements about various countries in my presence, but I don’t remember the Russian Federation expecting me to react to those statements,” he told journalists.
Pashinian and Zelenskyy also met separately on the sidelines of the summit held just a few kilometers from the Erebuni airbase, home to Russian warplanes. The Ukrainian leader said afterwards that Kyiv and Yerevan are “resuming an active dialogue between our countries.”
His visit to the Armenian capital added to Russian criticism of a continuing pro-Western tilt in Armenia’s foreign policy. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on Thursday that the South Caucasus country will pay “political and economic” consequences for siding with the European Union against Russia. In a related development, Russian President Vladimir Putin said over the weekend that Yerevan should leave a Russian-led trade bloc or stop seeking membership of the EU.
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