Author: Emil Lazarian

As the morning sun casts its first rays over the Kremlin, the political atmosphere within seems as frosty as the air outside. Armenia's recent announcement to 'freeze' its participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has sent shockwaves through the corridors of power in Moscow, challenging the longstanding alliance between Russia and Armenia. This move, articulated by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, has sparked a flurry of diplomatic exchanges, with Russia seeking a comprehensive explanation and openly criticizing Armenia's decision.

At the core of this diplomatic rift is Armenia's dissatisfaction with the CSTO, particularly its perceived failure to fulfill obligations towards Yerevan. Prime Minister Pashinyan's bold statement on 'freezing participation' underscores a growing frustration with the organization's response—or lack thereof—to Armenia's security concerns. This decision, announced in a recent interview, has left Moscow scrambling for answers, with the Russian Foreign Ministry strongly rejecting the criticisms and emphasizing the need for confidential dialogue to resolve any issues within the framework of their partnership.

Complicating matters further is Armenia's choice to invite observers from the European Union for security consultations, a move seen by Russia as a pointed critique of the CSTO's effectiveness. This decision not only highlights a potential shift in Yerevan's geopolitical alliances but also raises questions about the future of Russian-Armenian relations. The situation is further nuanced by Pashinyan's comments on the challenges of achieving peace with Azerbaijan, suggesting that Armenia is reevaluating its strategic partnerships in light of ongoing regional tensions.

Russia's reaction to Armenia's announcement has been one of both concern and criticism. The Russian Foreign Ministry's call for a comprehensive explanation from Armenia reflects Moscow's desire to maintain its influence in the region and uphold the CSTO's integrity. However, Russia's outright rejection of Armenian criticisms and its emphasis on resolving concerns through dialogue suggest an attempt to downplay the severity of the rift, perhaps in hopes of preserving the alliance's facade of unity.

The Kremlin's response also highlights a broader geopolitical chess game, with Russia keen on preventing any erosion of its sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. Armenia's flirtation with the European Union, albeit for security consultations, raises the specter of a realignment that could diminish Russia's leverage in the South Caucasus. Thus, Moscow's diplomatic maneuvering in the wake of Yerevan's announcement can be seen as part of a larger effort to reassert its dominance and discourage further defections from its orbit.

In the midst of this diplomatic quagmire, the importance of open and confidential dialogue cannot be overstated. Russia's call for a constructive approach to address the issues within the CSTO framework underscores the potential for reconciliation, albeit through a process of negotiations that could test the resilience of Russian-Armenian relations. The hope that Armenia will recognize the importance of resolving concerns through dialogue offers a glimmer of optimism in an otherwise tense situation.

As both nations navigate this challenging chapter, the international community watches closely, aware that the outcome could have far-reaching implications for regional stability and the balance of power in the South Caucasus. The path forward is uncertain, but what remains clear is the need for honest communication and a willingness to address the underlying issues that have led to this moment of reckoning.

https://bnnbreaking.com/politics/armenias-csto-membership-freeze-a-rift-in-russian-armenian-relations

Armenia is ideally positioned to offer India an alternative sea trade route, especially with Europe, Narek Mkrtchyan, the country's minister for Labor and Social Affairs, said on the sidelines of the ninth edition of the Raisina Dialogue in the national capital on Wednesday.

"The Armenian government is committed to forming partnerships in major regional and global projects like the North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), the Gulf Black Sea transport, and the transit corridor and the Chabahar port development, which is a collaborative effort between India and Iran," the minister told ANI on the sidelines of the event.

The Raisina Dialogue is India's flagship conference on geopolitics and geoeconomics, committed to addressing the most challenging issues facing the global community.

Further expanding on the country's offer of an alternative route for commerce, the Armenian minister said it was 'significant' at a time when many nations, including India, are looking for alternative sea routes to trade with Europe and the West, given the spate of attacks on commercial vessels passing through the Red Sea.

The Houthi attacks on commercial vessels on Red Sea trade routes started in mid-November, with the group linking the disruptions to its demand for an end to Israel's offensive in Gaza and the delivery of aid to Palestinians 'under siege'.

"Armenia holds a strategic position to propose to India an alternative sea trade route, particularly with Europe," Mkrtchyan said.

He also stressed Armenia's commitment to partnerships in significant regional and global projects, including the North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), the Gulf Black Sea transport, the transit corridor, and the collaborative development of the Chabahar port with India and Iran.

This proposal is significant amid the growing interest in alternative sea routes due to security concerns in traditional routes like those on the Red Sea.

The minister also pitched a collaboration with India on Artificial Intelligence (AI) through a global coalition where ministers of the two countries can consult and trigger investments for AI.

"There is a potential to collaborate on AI for social good to address sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and environmental conservation planning. We could also potentially establish a global AI innovation platform to facilitate the sharing of Solutions and Research," he added.

Bilateral dialogue between India and Armenia is conducted through the mechanisms of Foreign Office Consultations and Inter-Governmental Commission on trade, economic, scientific and technological, Cultural and Educational Cooperation, and periodic high-level interactions, the Ministry of External Affairs stated in an official release earlier.

The ninth edition of Raisina Dialogue began on Wednesday and is scheduled to conclude on February 23. The event is organised by the Ministry of External Affairs in collaboration with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a think tank.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the chief guest and keynote speaker at the 9th Raisina Dialogue.

Ministers, National Security Advisors, senior officials and representatives of industry, technology, finance and other sectors from more than 100 nations are participating in the event this year.

Azerbaijan officially revealed its acquisition of the sophisticated Turkish Bayraktar Akinci combat drone on Feb. 9, following criticisms by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of neighboring Armenia’s recent arms purchases.

Aliyev inspected the newly-acquired high-altitude long-endurance, unmanned combat aerial vehicle on Feb. 9 and various accompanying Turkish-made weaponry, including SOM and Cakir cruise missiles produced by Turkey’s Rokestan missile manufacturer. He even signed the drone.

The Akinci ACAV is much larger and has more advanced and sophisticated sensors than its widely exported predecessor, the Bayraktar TB2. It also has more hardpoints and can carry heavier and more sophisticated bombs and missiles than the TB2. Azerbaijani TB2s devastated Armenian ground forces during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended in a decisive victory for Baku.

The Akinci can also carry long-range munitions, such as the cruise missiles Aliyev inspected, meaning it could potentially launch standoff strikes against Armenian targets while staying out of range of air defenses and even without leaving Azerbaijani airspace.

The UCAV’s powerful active electronically scanned array radar and sensors could complete valuable intelligence-surveillance-target acquisition (ISTAR) and command-control-communications (C3) tasks for the Azerbaijani armed forces.

The Akinci is the most advanced drone Azerbaijan has procured to date and is another testament to the close military ties between Baku and Ankara.

The UCAV’s unveiling came mere months after Aliyev sharply criticized France and India for selling Armenia military hardware. He accused those countries of “pouring oil on fire” and creating “unrealistic illusions in Armenia” that it could retake Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku completely conquered the enclave in a lightning military offensive on Sept. 19, which resulted in the entire ethnic Armenian population of over 100,000 people fleeing in terror to Armenia, causing a humanitarian crisis.

Armenia has signed significant arms deals with France and India in recent months. These deals coincided with Yerevan’s growing frustration with Moscow, which traditionally served as its leading arms supplier and security guarantor since the end of the Cold War, after Moscow failed to prevent, or even significantly protest, Azerbaijan’s military offensives. Furthermore, Armenia wants to diversify its sources for military hardware since Russia has become a much less reliable provider of arms, spare parts, and technical support since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Most of the weaponry Armenia has ordered so far is defensive. It’s acquiring short-range Mistral air defenses and Bastion armored personnel carriers from France. From India, it has ordered Pinaka multiple rocket launchers and medium-range Akash air defenses.

Armenia’s interest in diversifying its air defenses is unsurprising. During the 2020 war, Azerbaijan’s Israeli-built Harop loitering munitions sought out and destroyed Armenian Soviet-built long-range S-300 air defense missile systems within Armenia’s borders. The Akash can purportedly target aircraft and cruise missiles from up to 28 miles away, which Yerevan would need if it came under attack from Azerbaijani Akincis. The Mistral can do little more than provide point defense for specific bases or installations, certainly no game-changing capability.

In other words, while these acquisitions will enhance Armenia’s defenses, they won’t alter the balance of military power in the South Caucasus. And Azerbaijan already possesses equivalent and even superior systems.

Azerbaijan notably live-fired an Israeli Barak air defense system during a large air defense drill in the week leading up to its September 2023 Karabakh operation. The move was likely in preparation to prevent Armenia from intervening with its modest air force or retaliating with its Iskander short-range ballistic missiles. Azerbaijan is widely believed to have downed an Armenian Iskander in 2020 with a Barak 8. Like Armenia, it also has S-300s, which participated in a training exercise this month.

Baku also reportedly used Harops and Israeli-made LORA theater quasi-ballistic missiles during the September operation. Israel supplied the Azerbaijani military with equipment and ammunition in the lead-up to both offensives.

Most recently, Armenia lost four of its soldiers to Azerbaijani fire on the border on Feb. 13. Even Aliyev’s closest ally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, urged him to avoid such flare-ups and pursue a comprehensive peace deal with Yerevan.

Armenia has already agreed to relinquish all claims to Karabakh provided its national sovereignty is recognized and not violated in line with its Soviet-era borders. The Azerbaijani president has coveted parts of southern Armenia to establish a land bridge, which Azerbaijan dubs the Zangezur Corridor, to link up with its western Nakhchivan exclave. However, he has shown openness to establishing an alternative corridor through Iran.

In the meantime, without a peace agreement, and with Azerbaijan continually enhancing its modern military with cutting-edge Akinci drones and Israeli weaponry, Armenia is investing in relatively modest defense acquisitions in preparation for the utterly unthinkable: a third conflict in the region in this decade.

YEREVAN, Armenia (JTA) — It’s just after sunset on a chilly February evening as Mama Jan begins filling up with customers. The cozy little café, located on Alexander Speniaryan Street — one block from Yerevan’s Freedom Square — lures passersby with its traditional khashlama (Armenian meat stew), dolma (stuffed grape leaves) and grappa (homemade brandy).

Inside, Edith Piaf melodies play softly in the background, while a blackboard near the bar lists the upcoming week’s activities: Saturday, a meeting of the English-speaking club; Sunday, a lecture on feminism; Wednesday, a screening of the movie “Golda,” and on Friday, Kabbalat Shabbat featuring baked challah and pomegranate wine.

Overseeing it all is Julia Kislev, a vivacious Crimean Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1992, settled in South Tel Aviv and learned fluent Hebrew. In 2016, Kislev joined her Armenian actor husband in Yerevan, and four years later, she opened Mama Jan — which has since become the unofficial gathering place of Armenia’s newest Jews, those displaced by the two-year-old Russia-Ukraine war.

“They find their shelter here,” said Kislev, 55, an Israeli citizen with local residency status.

In the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, this landlocked former Soviet republic in the Caucasus has seen a surprise influx of Jews — mostly liberal young Russians opposed to the war, but also Ukrainians seeking safe haven. Together, their arrival has boosted Armenia’s total Jewish population tenfold, from fewer than a hundred to well over 1,000 today.

That’s a big deal for an ancient land that never had many Jews to begin with, even though Armenia — the world’s first Christian nation — boasts a medieval Jewish cemetery with 64 tombstones in Hebrew and Aramaic dating back to the year 1266.

Armenia became a Soviet republic in 1920, and following World War II, Jews relocated here from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Azerbaijan. But after the USSR itself collapsed in 1991, nearly the entire Jewish community of 15,000 families emigrated en masse to Israel, leaving only a handful of aging congregants to keep the dwindling community from disappearing altogether.

“If it weren’t for the war between Russia and Ukraine, there’d be maybe 50 or 100 Jews left here,” said Rabbi Gershon Meir Burshtein, spiritual leader at the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of Armenia. “We were thinking this would be the end. But then this influx of Jews came from Russia, mainly young people thirsting for Yiddishkeit.”

According to community organizer Nataniel Trubkin, some 120,000 Russian citizens fled to this Maryland-sized land of 3 million in the weeks and months following President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

Some feared the draft; others were worried about sanctions and freezing of bank accounts. Their arrival contributed to a local construction boom that helped boost Armenia’s GDP by 12% in 2022 and a further 8% last year. Yet many Russians have since gone on to third countries or returned home.

Of the Russian Jews who remain, said Trubkin, about 60% are Muscovites like himself; the rest hail mainly from St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

“There may actually be more than 1,000 Russians with Jewish blood here, but for various reasons they have not shared their identity,” said Trubkin, who does copywriting and social media marketing for various Jewish organizations. “It’s interesting that most of these people are from the same social class — sometimes even from the same neighborhoods of Moscow.”

Likewise, of the 5,000 or so Ukrainian refugees who remain in Armenia, about 1,500 are Jews.

Trubkin, 43, is among the regular patrons at Mama Jan, which under Kislev’s supervision hosts gatherings for every major Jewish holiday including Hanukkah and Purim. Burshtein, who bears a striking resemblance to Tevye the Dairyman, comes to the café often to conduct prayers, and some of the recent Russian arrivals have begun attending Shabbat services at his synagogue — the only one in Armenia.

One reason Armenia is so attractive to these newcomers — Jewish or not — is its lack of visa restrictions. It’s also easy to get flights to Yerevan from Russia, where air travel is limited because of sanctions imposed after the war’s start. Plus, the new Russian arrivals say, the locals are warm and welcoming, both to Russians and to Jews.

That’s a sharp contrast to neighboring Georgia, 20% of which remains under Russian military occupation following the Kremlin’s 2008 invasion. Anti-Russian graffiti can be seen throughout Tbilisi, where Russian immigrants, regardless of their political beliefs, are widely resented.

And despite Armenia’s unhappiness with Israeli weapons sales to archenemy Azerbaijan, as well as Israel’s refusal to officially recognize the 1915 Ottoman genocide of more than 1 million ethnic Armenians, the new arrivals say they have been pleasantly surprised not to have encountered the kind of violent antisemitism that has existed in Russia for centuries.

“In the media, Azerbaijan has been trying really hard to paint Armenia as an antisemitic, intolerant country. I work in the media here and know full well how it works,” Trubkin said, referring to regular warnings issued by the government of Azerbaijan that Armenia is rife with Nazism.

“We have a lot of experience fighting antisemitism,” he said. “We haven’t seen any here.”

It was after a particularly vicious attack by local neo-Nazis at a Moscow subway station that St. Petersburg native Anton Ronis, 22, decided to give up his spot studying economics at a prestigious academy and leave for Armenia.

The black eye the young Jew received cemented feelings that he had experienced since the beginning of the war.

“When the war [against Ukraine] started, I began talking to my friends at school, but it was like talking to a wall,” said Ronis, who protested against the Putin regime. “I realized that I could not influence the situation. I wanted to be useful, and I understood that in Yerevan, I could do more than in Russia. Those who support this war are people with very scary ideas, and they consider me their ideological enemy.”

For the past year, Ronis has been volunteering for the past year at Dopomoga—an Armenian charity that offers Ukrainian newcomers humanitarian assistance and language classes.

Yan Schenkman, an independent journalist, fled to Armenia from Russia in March 2022, just weeks after the war began.

“There was no reason for me to stay in Moscow. It was very dangerous for me,” said the 51-year-old, who wrote about artists, musicians and other dissidents for a variety of Russian-language print and online media before his departure. He had also visited Israel but didn’t feel comfortable there because, he said, “the Israelis are very aggressive.”

Since his arrival in Yerevan, Schenkman said he only occasionally hears antisemitic comments.

“Armenians know that Israel supports Azerbaijan with arms sales. But they also understand that Russians who come here have nothing in common with Putin, in the same way they distinguish between the Israeli government and ordinary Jews,” he said. “Every country has crazy, resentful people who push propaganda. Fortunately, in Armenia, there are not many of them.”

Tatiana Kliuchnikova, 28, arrived in Armenia on March 3, 2022 — exactly one week after the war began — with her 30-year-old husband Mikhail, who had previous army experience.

“We realized he’d be among the first to be drafted if it came to mobilization, so we came here,” said Kliuchnikova, who gives English and French lessons and also works as a translator. “We also went to Israel for two weeks to see what it feels like, but we don’t know the language and it’s difficult to integrate. Here, we feel accepted.”

Kliuchnikova added that in Armenia, Russian is widely spoken, and it’s easy to make a living.

“If you had asked me six years ago, I wouldn’t have thought of leaving Russia,” she said. “But for now, we want to stay in Armenia. We don’t want to go anywhere else.”

Hosting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Macron expressed concern over recent events in Armenia's Syunik region, highlighting the persistent threat of escalation on the ground.

The warning comes in the wake of accusations from Armenia against Azerbaijan for opening fire at their border on February 13, leading to the death of four Armenian soldiers and injuring another, according to Yerevan.

This incident occurred a day after an Azerbaijani individual was wounded by Armenian gunfire.

Macron expressed regret over the Armenian gunfire that resulted in an Azerbaijani casualty on February 12, commending the Armenian authorities for their transparency in addressing the incident. However, he criticized Azerbaijan's "disproportionate response" to the event.

Despite these incidents, both neighboring countries committed to continuing dialogue to resolve their disputes, which have led to numerous armed conflicts since the early 1990s, during a meeting in Germany on Saturday.