20:15,
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 14, ARMENPRESS. In Luxembourg, with the participation of Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan and Xavier Bettel, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Luxembourg, the official opening ceremony of the office of Armenia in Luxembourg was held, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said.
The flag of Armenia was raised by Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan, followed by playing of the national anthems of Armenia and Luxembourg.
10:37,
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 14, ARMENPRESS. First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Lieutenant General Kamo Kochunts has been relieved of duties.
President Khachaturyan signed the Lt Gen’s dismissal decree at the advice of Prime Minister Pashinyan.
13:01, 2 February 2024
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 2, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has arrived in Kazakhstan, his office said.
Pashinyan will chair the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council session, a prime ministerial meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), on February 2 in Almaty.
He was met by Kazakh Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov at the session’s venue.
Armenia holds the EEU presidency for 2024.
Executive Summary:
On January 19, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called for a new constitution in a meeting with senior officials from the Armenian Ministry of Justice. Pashinyan asserted that Armenia needs “a new constitution, not constitutional changes,” adding that the new foundational document would make the country “more competitive and viable in the new geopolitical and regional environment” (Azatutyun.am, January 19). He highlighted that the new constitution would maintain the present parliamentary system and underscored “external security” and “internationally recognized sovereign territory” as the main issues to be addressed. Mutual respect for one another’s territorial integrity remains a sticking point in peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. If Yerevan proceeds with Pashinyan’s proposal, the new constitution would eliminate certain hurdles to signing a peace treaty with Baku.
Pashinyan’s plan is widely believed to be related to the normalization of Armenian relations with Azerbaijan and Türkiye. Azerbaijani officials and experts often argue that the current Armenian constitution contains territorial claims against Baku and Ankara. In 2021, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev referred to this as one of the main challenges to peace efforts in the South Caucasus. In an interview with a Turkish media channel, Aliyev declared, “There is a territorial claim against Türkiye in the Constitution of Armenia. They should abandon that. They need to revise and re-adopt their constitution. … They must give up their claims against Türkiye and Azerbaijan” (President.az, September 28, 2021).
Yerevan also has concerns about Azerbaijan respecting Armenia’s territorial integrity. On October 17, 2023, during a session of the European Parliament, Pashinyan stated, “Armenia recognizes Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity within [a land area of] 86,600 square kilometers. But the president of Azerbaijan has not responded in kind. … This has raised concerns among some analysts that he is deliberately maintaining some ambiguity in order to make territorial claims against Armenia” (TASS, October 17, 2023). Baku has tried to alleviate those concerns and, in December, signed a joint statement “reconfirming the intention to normalize relations and reach a peace treaty on the basis of respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity” (Euronews, December 7, 2023).
Pashinyan’s government seems to have accepted Baku’s worries and agrees with the necessity of unambiguously recognizing both countries’ territorial integrity. On January 20, during a meeting with members of his political party, Pashinyan stated that Armenia and Azerbaijan need to ensure that there will be no basis for the resurgence of territorial claims in the future. He declared, “Diplomatic texts always have different twists, subtexts, and footnotes. The footnotes of Azerbaijan’s proposals, and perhaps Azerbaijan in ours, observe the dangers of territorial claims, if not today, then in the future” (Armenpress.com, January 20).
The opening of the Zangezur Corridor has become a more contentious issue in this regard and threatens to derail the peace process. In an interview with local television channels on January 10, Aliyev stated that, if this corridor remains closed, Azerbaijan refuses to open its border with Armenia anywhere else (President.az, January 10). The Azerbaijani government expects Yerevan to provide “unimpeded” land passage between the western part of mainland Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan exclave as envisioned under the November 2020 trilateral statement ending the Second Karabakh War. Baku insists that cargo, passengers, and vehicles should be subject to inspection and customs clearance only when they travel internationally, not between mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. Azerbaijan also expects Armenia to agree with the deployment of Russian border guards along the corridor.
Armenia has not agreed to these terms, while Russia agrees with only the second condition. Yerevan has proposed providing the Zangezur Corridor with the same regulations that would be applied to the trans-Iranian Aras Corridor (Armenpress.am, January 17). This is unacceptable to the Russian side, as Moscow wants Armenia to abide by the November 2020 trilateral statement. The Kremlin, however, rejects the Azerbaijani proposal for unchecked and customs-free passage along the Zangezur Corridor. According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, such an arrangement had never been discussed in the earlier trilateral meetings of Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Russian leaders (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (MID), January 18).
Lavrov also argues that Russian border guards should regulate transit along this land route, including customs and security checks. In a briefing on January 18, Lavrov said, “Armenia is having difficulty opening the route as laid out in the trilateral statement. Yerevan is putting forward additional security requirements for the route. It does not want Russian border guards to be there, though this is written in the statement that bears Pashinyan’s signature. He does not want to see non-aligned customs and border control. He wants Armenia to run it, which contradicts the agreement” (MID, January 18). Additionally, Lavrov criticized Western interference for blocking the implementation of the agreements reached by the regional countries.
Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to agree on the necessity for unequivocal recognition of one another’s territorial integrity to facilitate lasting peace in the region. The disputes concerning the Zangezur Corridor, however, may delay their efforts to sign a peace agreement in the near future. Further complicating matters, the Zangezur issue has wider geopolitical implications, directly involving Russia and indirectly involving the West. Baku realizes the disadvantages of this situation and calls for bilateral talks with Yerevan on all remaining issues between the two states, promoting the “regional solutions to regional problems” approach (see EDM, October 25, November 13, 27, 2023). The two republics of the South Caucasus may be unable to reach a peace treaty if they fail to neutralize the self-serving intervention of third parties.
https://jamestown.org/program/armenia-and-azerbaijan-address-concerns-over-territorial-integrity/
The Armenian military has somehow managed to lose 17,000 assault rifles. It is not a joke, according to the Armenian Minister of Internal Affairs of Armenia Vahe Ghazaryan this amount of assault weapons is missing from the armouries. The main assault weapon of the Armenian military are Russian-produced Kalashnikov rifles – writes Sarah Miller.
It is difficult to comprehend this number – 17000. Just imagine – this is enough weapons to arm three and a half infantry brigades! The whole Armenian military is 65 thousand strong – so the missing weapons would be enough for a quarter of its personnel. If they are properly packed, it will be over 1400 pretty large and heavy boxes (of 12 rifles each), which would take more than 10 military trucks to move.
According to Ghazaryan, the weapons went missing after the so-called 44-days war at the end of 2020 – when Azerbaijan liberated most of the Armenia occupied Karabakh region. They were not lost during the war, or captured by enemy troops – the assault rifles went missing after the conflict.
Ghazaryan also noted that he is “concerned about the issue related to weapons and ammunition”, as it might have “potential consequences for regional security and stability”. So, there is also ammunition missing, and nobody knows how much.
If the weapons were stolen by the local population, any citizens’ revolt is likely to turn into a bloody mess and collapse the state. But considering the political situation in Armenia, and recurrent mass protests that have not turned into armed insurrection, the guns are probably not in the country anymore. Hiding 17 thousand assault rifles would be difficult in a country the size of Armenia.
Where are these weapons now? They definitely did not leave Armenia through Turkish, Georgian or Azerbaijani borders. There is only one neighbouring country, which is very interested in purchasing weaponry anywhere on the planet – Iran. As the backbone supporter of various terrorist organisations, Tehran regularly supplies them with light and heavy armament.
The Russian-produced assault rifles have an added value. They are actually untraceable. Iran produces its own analogues of Kalashnikov – the KLF or KLS rifles. But they are easily identifiable by slight design differences, overall low quality, manufacture markings and the fire selector markings on the weapons. Supplying Russian manufactured weapons to Houthis, Hezbollah or HAMAS is preferable – nobody knows where they came from exactly, as the Russian markings may be found in many places.
Armenia, being today an important part of an Iranian – Russian axis, due to Yerevan's eager assistance in circumventing sanctions, is a likely place to get such weapons.
Just imagine that “missing” from the Armenian military stockpiles since 2020 Kalashnikovs’ might have reached HAMAS, and may have been used in the October 7th massacre in Israel.
A year ago, Russian propaganda was actively pushing the narrative that arms sent to Ukraine will end up in criminal hands. The claims were that hundreds of units of firearms were sold to the different gangs in Eastern Europe. There was a big fuss in the media about that, though the evidence was pretty vague. Of course, it is totally plausible that criminals could get weapons from a war zone.
But surprisingly we are not talking about 17 thousand assault rifles, which disappeared in a country bordering Iran – the biggest known supplier of weapons to terrorists around the globe.
https://www.eureporter.co/world/armenia/2024/01/22/regional-destabilizer-who-are-the-victims-of-the-lost-armenian-assault-rifles/
Russia's Foreign Ministry has angrily defended the performance of the country's peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In September last year the 2,000-strong peacekeeping contingent did not intervene as Baku launched a lightning offensive to retake the region, which resulted in near-complete emptying of its Armenian population.
And that came at the end of a nine-month blockade of the region during which the Russian troops were of limited help in getting supplies into Karabakh and transporting Karabakhis to Armenia for medical treatment.
A number of Armenian officials, most recently Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan, have complained publicly about what they saw as the peacekeepers' failure to protect the roughly 100,000 local Armenians.
"From September 19, ethnic cleansing started in NK. Until now, we haven't received any explanation of how the ethnic cleansing occurred in the presence of Russian peacekeepers. We haven't seen any explanations," Grigoryan said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stridently disagrees.
"We believe that these [accusations] are attempts to falsify the facts to avoid responsibility. There was no mass death of Nagorno-Karabakh civilians or significant damage to civilian facilities," she said at a briefing on January 12.
That is arguably true. Azerbaijani troops did not target Karabakhi civilians en masse, though there were sporadic reports of atrocities in villages. The exodus of the Armenians from Karabakh was nonetheless violent and chaotic. As locals were fleeing, over 200 people died in a fuel depot explosion and an estimated 64 died during the trek to Armenia, which saw days-long traffic jams. (An estimated 220 Karabakhi soldiers lost their lives trying to resist the onslaught.)
"No one has the right to insult the peacekeepers, and we will respond to those who insulted them," Zakharova added.
She also bristled at the use of the term "ethnic cleansing," which has been used by many other Armenian officials, including Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
"Regarding the claims of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh, I would like to be presented with any facts, any documents, or statements from any international organization that is considered authoritative in Yerevan, for example, the United Nations or another organization," she added.
The peacekeepers were stationed in Karabakh under a Russia-brokered ceasefire in November 2020 immediately after Azerbaijan's victory in the Second Karabakh War and seizure of lands in and around the region. The Russian troops operated amidst ambiguity, with no clearly defined mandate.
Questions about the efficacy of the peacekeeping effort arose early on. In December 2020, Russian peacekeepers were unable to prevent Azerbaijan from seizing two Karabakh villages in their purported zone of responsibility. Over the next three years, Azerbaijan continued incursions into Karabakh, capturing additional territories and putting civilians at risk along the border.
In December 2022, as Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin corridor, the sole route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia and the outside world, the peacekeepers were unable or unwilling to unblock it. The blockade continued for over nine months until Azerbaijan's decisive offensive in September that resulted in the dissolution of the de facto republic through another Russia-brokered ceasefire and the surrender of local defense forces. In the ensuing days, the entire population of Karabakh evacuated to Armenia, leaving the region empty save for a few dozen inhabitants, all while Russian peacekeepers looked on.
Russia said several of its troops were killed during Azerbaijan's offensive, including a senior officer, but did not reveal details of the incident nor the precise number killed.
After Azerbaijan established full control over the region, the Russians dismantled several observation posts. They now coordinate their peacekeeping activities exclusively with Azerbaijan. The peacekeepers' news bulletin keeps recording the absence of ceasefire violations and continuous interactions with Baku "to ensure the security of the civilian population."
Most recently, Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister signaled the possible withdrawal of peacekeepers in 2025, as the 2020 tripartite agreement initially stipulated.
Armenian officials have not commented on Zakharova's remarks.
The construction of roads and railways passing through the corridor, set to function as a route from China to Türkiye, is expected to be completed by the end of 2024.
Azerbaijan is continuing the construction of roads and railways passing through the Zangezur Corridor, a route to connect its western regions with its exclave of Nakhchivan and serve as a route for the middle corridor extending from China to Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, and finally Türkiye.
Following the Second Karabakh War, on November 10, 2020, a declaration was signed by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia agreeing to open land roads and railways between Azerbaijan and the eastern Nakhchivan region, a non-contiguous part of Azerbaijan, with a section of Armenia lying in between the two.
After the war, Azerbaijan began construction of roads and railways extending from its own territories to the Armenian border.
While construction of the railway and road in the Azerbaijani part of the Zangezur Corridor is progressing rapidly, Armenia has not taken any steps on the project. In the absence of an agreement with Armenia, Azerbaijan is also working on alternative routes.
Azerbaijan has reached an agreement with the Iranian government for the construction of roads and railways connecting the country to Nakhchivan through Iran, as Iran’s territory lies nearby, south of the already proposed corridor.
According to agreements signed between the two countries, bridges for both roads and railways will be built over the Aras River – a river that flows through all four countries – providing transportation to Nakhchivan via Iran.
If an agreement is reached with Armenia, Azerbaijan will have two transportation alternatives to Nakhchivan, through either Armenia or Iran.
Turkish companies are actively involved in the construction of the line.
Due to mines laid during a nearly 30-year Armenian occupation that recently ended and challenging terrain conditions, completion of the line is expected by the end of 2024.
Over 80% is complete
The construction, coordinated by the Azerbaijan Highways State Agency, is being done by Turkish companies.
The road, with some sections having four lanes and others having six, includes 58 underpasses, 27 bridges, and three tunnels.
According to information obtained by Anadolu Agency, more than 80% of the road construction is already complete.
Türkiye and Azerbaijan also have a railway project to connect the Turkish city of Kars to Nakhchivan. The project, whose tender has been awarded, will start within the year.
Upon the completion of these projects, a new transportation connection will be established between Türkiye and Azerbaijan. At the same time, uninterrupted road and railway communication between Türkiye and Russia through Azerbaijan will be ensured.
https://www.trtworld.com/turkiye/azerbaijan-approaches-completion-in-zangezur-corridor-construction-16597004
13:03,
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 29, ARMENPRESS. Various international banking donor organizations have been displaying interest for the Crossroads of Peace project developed by the Armenian government, the Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Gnel Sanosyan has said.
“During our discussions they are trying to outline that they too are interested, and they’d be happy to be involved in case of a necessity of implementing construction or other processes in certain parts of the project. Thus, the signals have been rather positive,” Sanosyan said at a press conference.
19:24,
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 28, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's spouse Anna Hakobyan on December 28 visited Hematology Center named after Prof. R. H. Yeolyan.
Accompanied by Minister of Health Anahit Avanesyan and deputy director of the center, Hayk Grigoryan, Anna Hakobyan had a meeting with the children receiving treatment, Hakobyan’s Office said.
“Deputy director Hayk Grigoryan noted that 22 patients are receiving inpatient treatment at the center. About 90 new patients have been diagnosed this year. The center's management emphasized the acquisition of new diagnostic devices and the introduction of the latest technologies for more detailed research. Patients under the age of 25 are treated free of charge at the hematology center,” reads the statement.
According to the source, the deputy director Hayk Grigoryan noted that the number of people traveling abroad for treatment has decreased, as many of them prefer receiving treatment in Armenia.
The deputy director said that last year, cases were also recorded where foreigners had chosen Armenia and the Hematology Center as their place of treatment.
Anna Hakobyan visited all the children, distributed New Year's gifts and talked with them. The Prime Minister's wife asked family members and doctors about the children's health condition and the dynamics of treatment.
Anna Hakobyan encouraged both the children and parents to stay strong wishing them health and patience.
20:22,
YEREVAN, 26 DECEMBER, ARMENPRESS. The Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, have expressed their readiness to finalize the peace treaty, Russian mass media reports, quoting Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
“They are ready to conclude peace negotiations, issue a joint document, to sign the peace treaty," Peskov said in an interview with Channel One during the unofficial summit of the CIS in St. Petersburg. When asked whether it is not risky to gather conflicting parties in one place, Peskov responded: "There is no danger here."