“Should Armenia speak about the fact that Azerbaijan has violated the guidelines of the 2017 EU summit? Should Azerbaijan have the opportunity to sign the summit statement and join something it has already violated? What should we do about the OSCE Minsk Group? It has not been able to resume its work for a year now, but it has also not visited the conflict zone for a year, which is an unprecedented, sad, and disturbing fact,” the head of the Armenian Institute of International Security, Styopa Safaryan, said on November 30 during an expert discussion titled “Armenia’s Security Agenda Ahead of the Summits in Europe.”
On December 2-3, a sitting of the OSCE Ministerial Council will be held in Sweden, and on December 15, the Eastern Partnership summit will be held, where a meeting between Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev is planned. In this context, he considers Turkey’s step in support of Azerbaijan before the Sochi meeting when it was announced in the Security Council that Armenia should take the hand that was held out to it, otherwise it will be too late to be important. Especially since Azerbaijan, both in the summer in Uzbekistan and recently in Turkmenistan, again hinted at the topic of the Zangezur corridor. This time, however, Styopa Safaryan noticed a difference. According to him, if before they threatened, saying that they will take it by force if Armenia does not give it to them Syunik, now they consider the Zangezur corridor to be feasible and consider it in the south of Artsakh.
Styopa Safaryan is convinced that Turkey has been left out of all regional issues and raises a rhetorical question: are there any questions left in the 3 + 3, have Russia or the West left those questions? He views the recent trilateral meeting in Sochi in this context. “Russia has the need and demonstration to emphasize its role.”
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In confirmation of this, he also quoted the statement of the Russian President on the demand for his country’s mediation mission in the post-Soviet space. The Sochi meeting also convinced Styopa Safaryan that Turkey’s efforts to expand its role in the region have been thwarted, except for one point in Aghdam, a joint monitoring center. He notes that during the Sochi meeting, reference was made to the trilateral statement on November 9, 2020, which excludes Turkey’s participation in both the unblocking process and the demarcation and delimitation process. In the Sochi statement, the speaker considers the unconditional fulfillment of the November 9 statement to be an important point. He says that for the Armenian side, it is the return of prisoners of war and the exclusion of the “Zangezur Corridor.”
In his opinion, the fixation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in terms of increasing the level of stability and security may refer to the Artsakh border, as the reference is made to the November 9 statement. The demarcation-delimitation process mentioned in the statement by a bilateral commission under the auspices of the Russian Federation also did not meet Styopa Safaryan’s expectations.
He considers it remarkable that there is no direct involvement of Russia in this issue. But since the map consulting will be carried out by Russia, the Russian president and other officials have repeatedly stated that they have the Soviet maps of the 1920s, and Styopa Safaryan thinks that there is an opportunity to get involved in other international consultations, especially since during his online press conference, Nikol Pashinyan spoke about demarcation according to EU standards.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
