Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Putin Expects Solutions To Armenia’s ‘Sensitive Issues’
Russia - Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Armenian Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinian, Moscow, July 7, 2021.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on
Wednesday that he has a popular mandate to address “very acute and sensitive
issues” facing Armenia after winning last month’s parliamentary elections.
The two men met in Moscow for the first time since Pashinian’s party scored a
landslide victory in the June 20 elections which were called to end a serious
political crisis caused by the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Putin congratulated Pashinian on that victory in his opening remarks at the
talks held in the Kremlin.
“I think that … very acute and sensitive issues requiring a solution can be
solved only in case of being able to work effectively,” he said. “The most
important thing for that is to have the people’s trust. As the election results
showed, you do have it.”
“At such difficult moments in the life of a country, this is probably the most
important condition for further development,” he said.
Putin added that he is going to speak with Pashinian about “all issues which we
have discussed in detail lately and which require our solution.”
For his part, Pashinian noted that the situation in the Karabakh conflict zone
is “not very stable” despite Moscow’s efforts to cement the Russian-brokered
ceasefire that stopped the war in November. He pointed to a continuing military
standoff at some sections of the Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan.
No details of the talks and an ensuing working dinner between the two leaders
were immediately made public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the day that they will discuss
the situation in and around Karabakh and Russian-Armenian relations.
Putin telephoned Pashinian on June 24 to discuss Russian-backed plans to restore
transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan envisaged by the truce accord. He
also spoke with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by phone June 23.
“Special attention was paid to intensifying work in a trilateral format on the
restoration of economic links and transport routes in the South Caucasus,” the
Kremlin said in statement on Putin’s phone call with Aliyev.
At their January 11 meeting in Moscow, Putin, Aliyev and Pashinian agreed to set
up a trilateral working group tasked with working out practical modalities of
reopening the Armenian-Azerbaijani border for commercial traffic.
The group co-headed by deputy prime ministers of the three states held several
meetings in the following months. It has not met since Azerbaijani troops
crossed several sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border on May 12-14.
Ex-President Sarkisian Again Blames Pashinian For Karabakh War
• Gayane Saribekian
Armenia -- Former President Serzh Sarkisian holds a news conference in Yerevan,
August 19, 2020.
Former President Serzh Sarkisian has again accused Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinian of making last year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh inevitable with his
“reckless and irresponsible” policy on the conflict with Azerbaijan.
In an extensive article published by the Sputnik news agency on Tuesday,
Sarkisian claimed that he tried unsuccessfully to extend his decade-long rule
three years ago because he saw an opportunity achieve a compromise solution to
the conflict.
He claimed that Pashinian torpedoed such a settlement proposed by the United
States, Russia and France after coming to power in the “velvet revolution” of
April-May 2018.
“From May 2018 onwards, as a result of the new Armenian authorities’ grave
diplomatic blunders and reckless statements and actions, the situation began to
change not in favor of Yerevan which the international community began to regard
as an unconstructive party to the negotiating process,” he wrote. “Baku got what
it had for decades failed to achieve: accuse Armenia of abandoning negotiations
as a casus belli (occasion for war).”
A senior member of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, Ruben Rubinian, dismissed
Sarkisian’s claims on Wednesday. Rubinian accused the ex-president of lying
about the reason for his attempt to hold on to power after completing his second
and final term in office and effectively justifying Azerbaijan’s decision to
start the war in September 2020.
Speaking to RFE/RL’ Armenian Service, Rubinian said Sarkisian himself stated
shortly before his resignation that the Karabakh peace process is in deadlock
because of Baku’s continuing rejection of peace proposals made by the U.S.,
Russian and French mediators.
Sarkisian already denounced Pashinian’s handling of the peace process during the
recent parliamentary election campaign. He publicized Pashinian’s secretly
recorded comments on a peace plan proposed by the three co-chairs of the OSCE
Minsk Groups.
Pashinian says in the leaked audio that he rejected the plan because it would
not immediately formalize Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan and determine the
territory’s internationally recognized status.
The prime minster downplayed the pre-election leak and insisted that the
proposed settlement favored Azerbaijan. “The international community, on which
we pinned our hopes for many years, pressed us to return territories in return
for nothing,” he said.
Pashinian made similar statements in the immediate aftermath of the six-week war
stopped by a Russian-brokered agreement in November. He denied critics’
assertions that he could have prevented the disastrous hostilities, which left
at least 3,700 Armenian soldiers dead, by accepting the mediators’ peace
proposals.
In January, Igor Popov, the Russian co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, accused
Pashinian of misrepresenting those proposals. Popov specifically denied his
claims that the mediators offered the Armenians nothing in return for their
withdrawal from districts around Karabakh occupied by them in the early 1990s.
The envoy insisted that under the Minsk Group plan Karabakh’s population would
be able to determine the disputed territory’s status in a future legally binding
referendum.
Armenian Agricultural Exports Soar
Armenia - Workers at a commercial greenhouse in Ararat province, 19Apr2017.
The physical volume of fresh fruits and vegetables exported by Armenia nearly
doubled in the first half of this year, a senior government official said on
Wednesday.
“Our exports so far this year make up 104,000 tons, which is nearly twice as
much as in the same period of last year,” Deputy Economy Minister Arman Khojoyan
said in an interview with the Armenpress news agency.
Khojoyan did not specify the monetary value of those exports. He said instead
that that potatoes, tomatoes and apricots accounted for three-quarters of them.
In particular, he said, Armenia exported about 29,000 tons of potatoes, compared
with less than 10,000 tons exported in the whole of 2020. He also reported
sizable increases in both the volume and price of Armenian apricots sold abroad.
Armenia - Apricots purchased by a fruit-exporting companty from farmers in the
Ararat Valley, 21Jun2013.
Khojoyan attributed the sharp gains to this spring’s favorable weather
conditions.
They were followed by an unusually hot and dry weather in June. The resulting
drought has reportedly had a severe impact on cereal and vegetable crops.
Scores of farmers in various Armenian regions have staged angry protests in the
last two weeks against a serious lack of irrigation water supplied to their
agricultural land.
The drought has also adversely affected pastures across the country. According
to news reports, Armenian farmers dependent on animal husbandry are planning to
cull their livestock en masse because of a lack of hay.
Government officials have not yet estimated the drought’s likely impact on
Armenian agricultural output in 2021.
Agriculture generates roughly one-fifth of Armenia’s Gross Domestic Product.
Khojoyan said that Russia and other members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)
remain the principal market for Armenian agricultural exports.
“We operate in the common market,” the official told Armenpress. “It’s been a
while since we started regarding our market not as a 3 million market reflecting
the size of Armenia’s population but as a 184 million market encompassing the
whole EEU.”
Armenian Official Announces More Russian Troop Deployments
• Artak Khulian
• Naira Nalbandian
Armenia - An abandoned farm in a village in Gegharkunik province close to
Armenia's border with Azerbaijan, May 27, 2021. (Photo by Armenia's Office of
the Human Rights Defender)
Russia has begun preparations for deploying its troops in another Armenian
province bordering Azerbaijan, a senior Armenian official said on Wednesday.
“Some of them are already in the [Gegharkunik] province. They will be deployed
along the border some time later,” the provincial governor, Gnel Sanosian, told
reporters.
The deployment will start in the coming days, Sanosian said.
Gegharkunik borders the Kelbajar district west of Nagorno-Karabakh which was
retaken by Azerbaijan following the autumn war.
Azerbaijani troops crossed several sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border
and advanced a few kilometers into Gegharkunik and another province, Syunik, on
May 12-14, triggering a military standoff with Armenian forces. Yerevan has
repeatedly demanded their withdrawal.
Lieutenant-General Artak Davtian, the chief of the Armenian army’s General
Staff, announced the impending deployment of Russian border guards in
Gegharkunik late last month. Davtian said Moscow and Yerevan are close to
reaching a relevant agreement.
According to Sanosian, the deployment will be followed by the withdrawal of both
Armenian and Azerbaijani troops from contested border sections and the start of
Russian-mediated talks on the demarcation of the long frontier.
Armenia - Russian Ambassador Sergei Kopyrkin talks to a Russian soldier deployed
in Armenia's Syunik region, June 3, 2021.
Russia already dispatched soldiers and border guards to other parts of Syunik
following the Armenian-Azerbaijani war stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire
in November.
The Russian ambassador in Yerevan, Sergei Kopyrkin, confirmed on Wednesday that
Moscow and Yerevan are discussing practical modalities of further Russian troop
deployments in Armenia.
“As you know, Russian border guard posts have been deployed at various sections
of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border,” he said. “They are helping to keep the
situation on the border calm and stable so that the local population feels safer
and more comfortable in these unusual circumstances.”
“Discussions are underway about how such presence can be expanded,” Kopyrkin
told journalists after inaugurating a Russian cultural center in the Armenian
town of Armavir.
The issue was expected to be on the agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
talks with Armenia’s visiting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian scheduled for
Wednesday evening.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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