With Russia’s intermediation, on August 8-9, the meeting of Armenia and Azerbaijani Presidents, Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev, will be held. To the question of Aravot.am of how it turned out that the French President, Francois Hollande, did not accept the offer for organizing the meeting of the two presidents, whereas with Russia’s intermediation to organize the meeting was at once responded by both parties, the Director of the Armenian Center for Political and International Studies, political analyst Aghasi Yenokyan replied, “The minimum plan for Putin is already made, in other words, so far invitations were heard from Hollande and Kerry, but the two presidents were not responding to the invitations, and now Putin’s invitation worked right away, and they immediately meet in Sochi. Putin’s maximum plan is the deployment of Russian peacekeepers, which is hard to say whether it will become true at this stage or not.”
political analyst Aghasi Yenokyan
To our observation whether this means that the border tensions in the last days is also provoked by Russia or at least beneficial to it, Mr. Yenokyan responded, “Definitely, because there was no internal endemic reason now for increasing tension.” To our question of whether the situation on the border will become stabilized after the meeting between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Mr. Yenokyan replied, “However, the situation would calm down, since this seems to be the first round of Putin’s planned actions, which will be followed by another heat.” To our question of whether Russia will succeed with regard to deployment of Russian peacekeepers, the analysts said, “At least at this stage it will not succeed.”
Mr. Yenokyan interprets the fact of immediately responding to Russia’s offer by Armenia and Azerbaijan as follows, “Both of them realize that the manager of today’s situation is Russia, therefore, they immediately responded to Putin’s invitation. It is clear that this escalation was provoked by Russia and both countries are seeking for de-escalation of the situation.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
