Political scientist Sergey Minasyan is convinced that the expectations of the parties from Serzh Sargsyan-Aliyev meeting would not be met. “To begin with, there will be no large-scale operations. What happened in April were not large-scale military operations either, maybe it was an unprecedented escalation after 1994 but it was a limited military operation. The sides and societies have different expectations of the meeting in Petersburg, but most likely, none of these expectations would be completely met. The majority of the international community and the Armenian side expect that there would be a tendency to ease the tensions on the contact line, confidence-building mechanisms, and decisions on exclusion of new escalations while the Azerbaijani side would try to introduce and develop the April events in its own way by expecting unilateral concessions by the Armenian side.
But neither the first nor the second expectations will be met, and we will have a more complicated situation in the negotiation process, which later may or may not, yes, give a chance for military escalations,” – said the political scientist. He reminded that it is not the first time that the meeting of the two presidents is organized by the initiative of the Russian Federation and beyond the OSCE Minsk Group format, “At least after the Maindorf declaration in November 2008 that Russian-Georgian war took place, a Kazan format, the meetings in Sochi in August 2014 were not by the initiative of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs too, if the US and France co-chairs were present, this is was very formal, they were walking in the hallway and waiting to be called to say something.
Russia activates throughout the post-Soviet territory, also in the South Caucasus, it takes what it can. At the same time, I do not think that the Minsk Group format will completely come out or will be somehow canceled. Just yesterday, at the Russian parliament, Lavrov said that Russia does not want to monopolize this process. One country will not be able to reach a solution to a difficult conflict. Above all, Russia has also repeatedly mentioned that it is interested in the Minsk Group format as it is one of the unique formats that Russia against the background of the Ukrainian and other crisis with the West has a unique format, where it can cooperate and where there are even a consensus approaches, and Russia would not like to lose it.”
As Mr. Minasyan said this it a pattern that any military-political conflict escalation in the post-Soviet territory leads to Russia’s more active involvement, “It happened during the Georgian war in 2008, during the crisis in Ukraine, we also saw it after the April developments. When it comes to the military-political component, RF is the first to come out when it returns to the so-called diplomatic political format, here our western partners are trying to return. The April events showed that Russia is involved because it has both the desire, opportunity and will. We did not seed during the April incidents that the EU and the US are trying to get involved: the verbal ceasefire regime just as in 1994 was obtained almost by the only involvement of Russia.
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Arpine SIMONYAN
