Category: 2022

Armenia’s domestic debt is up by 18.4%

Boris Nahapetian
NEWS.am
Armenia – Aug 25 2022
Armenia's domestic debt is up by 18.4%
20:16, 25.08.2022

By Aram Achemyan

To mitigate the consequences of the 2020 economic crisis and solve political problems, the Armenian government increased the public debt, which reached $9.97 billion.

In 2021 alone, it increased by $1.3 billion or 16%, while GDP increased by only 5.7%.

The current government increased the public debt by $3.1 billion or 45.2%. In January-July of this year alone, it increased by $748.36 million or 8.1%.

Within 7 months, the internal debt increased by 219.4 billion drams or 18.4%, while the external debt decreased by 336.7 million dollars or 5.4%. It is important to emphasize that servicing domestic debt is more expensive for the state than external debt.

External debt decreased, while internal debt increased, as a result of which its structure changed. In particular, in July 2022, 58.6% of Armenia's public debt was external debt, and 41.4% was internal debt.

In December 2021, 66.9% was external debt and 33.1% was internal debt.

Ceteris paribus, an increase in domestic debt has a negative impact on the amount of investment in the country. The amounts provided for servicing the public debt will increase in the coming years, which requires a revision of the financial-credit and fiscal policies.


West and Russia are competing: Expert describes atmosphere of Aliyev-Pashinyan meeting

Lena Karagyozian
NEWS.am
Armenia – Aug 25 2022
22:00, 25.08.2022

Today it became known that the next meeting between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev will be held on August 31 in Brussels. A trilateral meeting was reported, no separate meeting between Pashinyan and Aliyev has been announced yet.

Azerbaijan increases the level of aggression

According to Azeri expert Taron Hovhannisyan, many problems were accumulated in the run-up to the meeting, including the aggressive behavior in Artsakh in early August.

Aliyev officially declares that the residents of Akhavno, Susa and Berdzor must and must leave their homes. This is, in fact, a forced deportation and contradicts Azerbaijan's false thesis that Armenians can supposedly live peacefully under Azerbaijani leadership. The authorities in Baku are forcing Armenians to leave their homes.

"I am convinced that the meeting will not take place in a constructive way because Baku is not in the mood for it, otherwise it would not pursue an aggressive policy. Azerbaijan's actions are becoming more and more aggressive against both the people of Artsakh and Armenia. Therefore, there is no chance for positive developments following the results of the meeting," the political analyst told NEWS.am.

In parallel, there are other issues such as unblocking communications, delimitation and demarcation, and humanitarian issues.

One day before the meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Brussels, the members of the commission for the Armenian-Azerbaijani border demarcation and security will have their second meeting in Moscow on August 30. The first such meeting was held on May 24 on the interstate border between Armenia and Azerbaijan at the Yeraskha section.

Baku fails to honor its commitments

According to Hovhannisyan, Azerbaijan has no desire to unblock communications. They are conditioned not by economic but political factors. Baku has shaped it into the idea of the so-called Zangezur corridor via Armenia.

Azerbaijan sees this not as an event aimed at creating a constructive atmosphere. The fact that there will be no such approach on the part of Azerbaijan is evidenced by Baku's position on the issue of fulfilling its obligations on the return of Armenian prisoners of war and civilian hostages, which (position) boils down to the initiation of false criminal cases. Azerbaijan refuses to fulfill its obligations to return all detainees.

This is the kind of step that could help build confidence, if there were such a desire, but Azerbaijan does not have it.

"I think the meeting will be reduced to an exchange of views," the expert believes.

Restrained competition between Russia and the West

The meetings are not initiated by Azerbaijan or Armenia. The mediator in this case is Brussels, but, as the political scientist noted, no one restricts the organization of meetings with the same intensity in Moscow.

"It is unrealistic to think that Brussels has leverage and can limit the organization of the meeting at the initiative of the Russian side.

The EU is undoubtedly an important player, but everybody is aware of Russia's military presence in the region, including in Karabakh, understands that the trilateral formats after November 9, 2020 were initiated with the mediation of Moscow.      

I do not think that the EU can even partially push Moscow out of the current processes, because only Russia has a real presence on the ground. Another thing is that there is competition between the West and Russia. Each side is trying to show that it is the most active mediator and is trying to resolve problems. This competition is also between the co-chairs of the OSCE MG (Russia on the one hand and the US and France on the other hand).

But all this doesn't mean that any of the sides leaves the process", Hovhannisyan said.

Aram Danielyan


Armenia, Azerbaijan: Baku Assumes Control of Lachin Corridor

Manouk Vasilian
Stratfor
Aug 25 2022

SITUATION REPORT

Aug 25, 2022 | 19:23 GMT

What Happened: Azerbaijani authorities assumed control of the Lachin Corridor area of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region per the 2020 cease-fire agreement, and Russian peacekeepers in the area are reportedly moving to the incomplete alternative road between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia News reported Aug. 25. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to meet in Brussels, Belgium, on Aug. 31 for talks mediated by the European Union.
 
Why It Matters: Transportation between Armenia and the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh republic through Lachin is expected to continue, but Armenian forces' departure from the area risks further isolating Nagorno-Karabakh by giving Azerbaijan the ability to sever the transportation links between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh should peace negotiations fail. According to Azerbaijani sources, construction of the alternative road connecting Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh should be fully open in the coming days, as Azerbaijan said it would construct another 4.8 kilometers of the alternative highway; this will lead to the faster completion of the stipulations of the 2020 cease-fire and thereby speed the possible conclusion of a peace agreement. Additionally, the newly announced meeting between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan suggests that such talks are progressing steadily.
 
Background: On July 18, the secretary of Armenia's security council said Armenia will withdraw all its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh by September. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has threatened to officially not recognize Armenia's territorial integrity should a peace deal not be signed.

New Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations

Karlen Baghdasarian
U.S. Department of State
Aug 25 2022

PRESS STATEMENT

ANTONY J. BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE

AUGUST 24, 2022

I am appointing Ambassador Philip T. Reeker as Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations.  In this capacity, Ambassador Reeker will serve as U.S. OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair and lead negotiator for the U.S. delegation to the Geneva International Discussions during this critical period.

Ambassador Reeker brings extensive experience in Europe and international organizations.  He served most recently at the Embassy of the United States of America in the United Kingdom as Chargé d’Affaires to the Court of St. James’s.  From March 2019 to August 2021, Ambassador Reeker was Acting Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.  Prior to heading the Bureau, Ambassador Reeker was Civilian Deputy and Policy Advisor to the Commander of U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.  He served earlier as United States Consul General in Milan, covering northern Italy, and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State focused on the Balkans, Central Europe, and Holocaust Issues.  From 2008-2011 he was U.S. Ambassador to North Macedonia.

The United States is committed to helping Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiate a long-term political settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.  Ambassador Reeker will engage bilaterally, with like-minded partners such as the European Union, and through his role as an OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair, to facilitate direct dialogue between Armenia and Azerbaijan.  Ambassador Reeker’s appointment at this time reaffirms the importance the United States places in the Geneva International Discussions on Georgia.

 

The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

Adrine Hakobian
SCIENCE
Aug 26 2022



Stories about the peopling—and people—of Southern Europe and West Asia have been passed down for thousands of years, and these stories have contributed to our historical understanding of populations. Genomic data provide the opportunity to truly understand these patterns independently from written history. In a trio of papers, Lazaridis et al. examined more than 700 ancient genomes from across this region, the Southern Arc, spanning 11,000 years, from the earliest farming cultures to post-Medieval times (see the Perspective by Arbuckle and Schwandt). On the basis of these results, the authors suggest that earlier reliance on modern phenotypes and ancient writings and artistic depictions provided an inaccurate picture of early Indo-Europeans, and they provide a revised history of the complex migrations and population integrations that shaped these cultures. —SNV
For thousands of years, humans moved across the “Southern Arc,” the area bridging Europe through Anatolia with West Asia. We report ancient DNA data from 727 individuals of this region over the past 11,000 years, which we co-analyzed with the published archaeogenetic record to understand the origins of its people. We focused on the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages about 7000 to 3000 years ago, when Indo-European language speakers first appeared.
Genetic data are relevant for understanding linguistic evolution because they can identify movement-driven opportunities for language spread. We investigated how the changing ancestral landscape of the Southern Arc, as reflected in DNA, corresponds to the structure inferred by linguistics, which links Anatolian (e.g., Hittite and Luwian) and Indo-European (e.g., Greek, Armenian, Latin, and Sanskrit) languages as twin daughters of a Proto-Indo-Anatolian language.
Steppe pastoralists of the Yamnaya culture initiated a chain of migrations linking Europe in the west to China and India in the East. Some people across the Balkans (about 5000 to 4500 years ago) traced almost all their genes to this expansion. Steppe migrants soon admixed with locals, creating a tapestry of diverse ancestry from which speakers of the Greek, Paleo-Balkan, and Albanian languages arose.
The Yamnaya expansion also crossed the Caucasus, and by about 4000 years ago, Armenia had become an enclave of low but pervasive steppe ancestry in West Asia, where the patrilineal descendants of Yamnaya men, virtually extinct on the steppe, persisted. The Armenian language was born there, related to Indo-European languages of Europe such as Greek by their shared Yamnaya heritage.
Neolithic Anatolians (in modern Turkey) were descended from both local hunter-gatherers and Eastern populations of the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and the Levant. By about 6500 years ago and thereafter, Anatolians became more genetically homogeneous, a process driven by the flow of Eastern ancestry across the peninsula. Earlier forms of Anatolian and non–Indo-European languages such as Hattic and Hurrian were likely spoken by migrants and locals participating in this great mixture.
Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestry of the Yamnaya was, by contrast, only partly local; half of it was West Asian, from both the Caucasus and the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. Migration into the steppe started by about 7000 years ago, making the later expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors.
All ancient Indo-European speakers can be traced back to the Yamnaya culture, whose southward expansions into the Southern Arc left a trace in the DNA of the Bronze Age people of the region. However, the link connecting the Proto-Indo-European–speaking Yamnaya with the speakers of Anatolian languages was in the highlands of West Asia, the ancestral region shared by both.
Many partings, many meetings: How migration and admixture drove early language spread.
Westward and northward migrations out of the West Asian highlands split the Proto-Indo-Anatolian language into Anatolian and Indo-European branches. Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe by a fusion of newcomers and locals, admixed again as they expanded far and wide, splitting the Proto-Indo-European language into its daughter languages across Eurasia. Border colors represent the ancestry and locations of five source populations before the migrations (arrows) and mixture (pie charts) documented here.
By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.

Government will not provide compensation to businesses affected from Surmalu blast

Garnik Tadevosian

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 12:45,

YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The government of Armenia will not provide compensation to the businesses that were affected from the recent explosion in Yerevan’s Surmalu trade center, Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan told reporters after the Cabinet meeting.

He said that the businessmen operating in Surmalu have not had insured their property.

“The government cannot take on itself a function and compensate that cost which the insurance company should have compensated. If the businessman did not consider that risk high, the government has nothing to do there”, he said.

The Surmalu blast, which took place on August 14, killed 16 and injured 60 more others.




Representatives of Artsakh and Azerbaijan discuss issue of use of Sarsang reservoir on mutually beneficial terms

Diana Dabaghian

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 13:05,

YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The Artsakh Information Center commented on the Azerbaijani media reports about the visit of the employees of the Azerbaijan "Amelioration and Water Management" Company to the Sarsang reservoir with the participation of representatives of the Artsakh Republic, which caused certain concerns and questions among the public.

“Yesterday, on August 22, the Azerbaijani media published information about the visit of the employees of the Azerbaijan "Amelioration and Water Management" Company to the Sarsang reservoir with the participation of representatives of the Artsakh Republic, which caused certain concerns and questions among the public.

In this regard, we inform you that considering the situation created after the 44-day war of 2020, in order to manage water resources and ensure the safety of drinking and irrigation water supplied to the public, the representatives of the Water Committee of the Artsakh Republic, with the mediation of the Russian peacekeeping troops deployed in Artsakh, have been in contact with the Azerbaijani side since 2021 and make periodic visits to the areas under the control of Azerbaijan to reach mutual agreements on the use of drinking and irrigation water supplied to a number of communities of the Republic (Stepanakert, inclusive) and settle some issues.

Within that framework, another meeting was organized near the Sarsang reservoir to discuss the issue of use of Sarsang waters on mutually beneficial terms. Ideas on the possible options for rational use of water were exchanged on the spot, taking into consideration the control of the Artsakh Republic over the Sarsang reservoir, and the control of Azerbaijan over the irrigation infrastructures. In the near future, discussions will continue and decisions will be made in the interests of the Artsakh Republic, based on the needs of both electricity generation and irrigation in the Sarsang region, as well as drinking and irrigation water needs in other parts of the Republic.

Although we understand the criticism addressed to the state structures of the Artsakh Republic, we would like to inform that the authorities of Artsakh do not seek to hide any event, they are guided merely by the interest of the Artsakh Republic and the people of Artsakh, tactfully taking all possible measures in the current situation to increase the level of security of the state and the public and neutralize the phenomena causing tension”, the statement says.

Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine reopens Sisian-based VH Stone plant

Mary Lazarian

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 13:13,

YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The Sisian-based VH Stone has reopened.

VH Stone, a stone processing plant, was founded in 2000. Since 2015 VH Stone has been owned by the Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine. Once employing over 120 people, the factory ceased operations in 2019.

In 2022, the new leadership of Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine made a strategic decision to re-launch the plant given its significance for the town of Sisian, and as part of a program to increase efficiency of all enterprises owned by Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine and expansion of economic impact.

Preparations for the re-launch began in May of 2022. Now, the plant employs 40 people. Output stands at 1500 sq.m. of product monthly. VH Stone has the capability to expand its industrial capacity up to 5000 sq.m. and open 80-100 jobs. Nearly 100% of the employees are Sisian locals.

Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine CEO, President of the GeoProMining Group of Companies Roman Khudoliy, the Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Gnel Sanosyan, Governor of Syunik Robert Ghukasyan and staffers of Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine attended the reopening ceremony.

“The reason why we are here today is very important for the town of Sisian, this region, for our staff and personally for me. Today we are reopening a factory which will provide jobs for many people. This is a strategic decision, to ensure the restoration of industrial capacity and not rely solely on social program. The Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine is reopening this factory believing that by having the chance for dignified work the population of this region can shape their future and develop their city and region with their own hands and work,” CEO Khudoliy said.

VH Stone is the only active industrial enterprise in Sisian.

The product of the factory is exported to Russia. VH Stone is planning to restore exports to several European countries, as well as South Korea.

Russia records over 70 daily COVID deaths first time since June 11

Ophelia Vardapetian

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 14:16,

YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The number of COVID-19 deaths in Russia has increased by 72 over the past 24 hours versus 69 the day before, TASS reported citing the anti-coronavirus crisis center.

This is the first time since June 11 that Russia registered more than 70 fatalities in a day. In all, according to the crisis center, since the onset of the pandemic, 383,758 people have died.

The number of infections has increased by 40,231 versus 30,967 a day earlier with a total of 19,221,602 while the number of recoveries has risen by 32,876 versus 30,869 the day before, reaching a total of 18,370,612.

As many as 3,872 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Russia over the past day, 4.7% fewer than in the previous day. The number of hospitalized patients increased in 39 regions, while in 46 other regions the figure declined. A day earlier, 4,063 people were rushed to hospitals.

Moscow’s COVID-19 cases surged by 9,414 over the past day, versus 4,997 a day earlier, reaching 2,981,183, according to the anti-coronavirus crisis center. St. Petersburg’s COVID-19 cases increased by 4,406 over the past day versus 4,412 a day earlier, reaching 1,630,498.