Last year more than 25.000 Armenia’s residents have accepted Russian citizenship. In 2016 that number amounted to approximately 22.000. The majority of them, of course, are people emigrated from Armenia and residing in the Russian Federation, but an extensive part are the residents of the Republic of Armenia. Practically, the majority of Armenian residents has an opportunity of becoming Russian citizen this or that way.
And it should not be excluded that at a certain moment more than a half of Armenian residents can become Russian citizens. This seems an unrealistic perspective now, but the number of the people having accepted Russian citizenship is terrifying.
It appears that 1% of our population becomes Russian citizen annually. And now imagine that the 60% of the Armenian population are Russian citizens. Moreover, citizens who are ready to stand in a queue at the polling station for a few hours in a wonderful sunny weather on Sunday and vote in favor of Vladimir Putin.
In other words, we deal with an organized, stubborn, to some extent even self-sacrificing community which is under an extremely strong influence of another country. It is not that important which country it is, be it the Russian Federation, the US, Japan, Indonesia or Burkina Faso. This is the issue of Armenia’s sovereignty. It is evident that in case of continuing this route Armenia will undoubtedly lose the last remnants of its sovereignty.