The other day, a meeting between the Chief of the General Staff of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Kerim Valiyev and the Deputy Commander of the Russian Ground Forces Alexei Kim took place in Baku. The Russian official is responsible for his country’s peacekeeping activities. The meeting led to the publication of one of Baku’s official media outlets, which, by the way, also sheds light on one of the main issues discussed by the generals.
From that publication, I think, it becomes clear that one of the main topics was the issue of gas supply in Artsakh. And here the propaganda means the approach of Baku to this issue. As long as there are “illegal armed formations” in Karabakh, as long as there are calls from the Armenian side “for revenge” and assurances that Artsakh will never be part of Azerbaijan, there will be no gas (the words in quotation marks are quotes). And in the end there is a direct threat to resolve the issue, or rather to continue to resolve it by military means.
A simple conclusion can be made from this text. Leaving the people of Artsakh without gas is not a matter of any “accident” or “technical failure.” It is a tool of political pressure and blackmail. Apparently, Azerbaijan would not have taken such a firm and uncompromising stance if Russia had been in a better position because the steps taken against the gas are directed not only against the Armenians, but also, ultimately, against the Russian peacekeepers and their mission. But the state of our ally, to put it mildly, is not enviable, because the Russian president has dragged the country into a hopeless and exhausting war in all respects. So, the positions of Turkey and Azerbaijan in the region will be strengthened, and Russia’s will be weakened.
If we do not try to make the desired happen, we must state that a) no positive signals are coming from Azerbaijan and b) the era of peace has not yet begun. In my opinion, our foreign policy officials have repeated the theses that propagate the opposite, but, unfortunately, do not correspond to reality, so they convinced themselves that a peace treaty will be signed tomorrow or the next day, and at the same time Artsakh will receive security guarantees in the form of status. Of course, I think we should strive for that, but there is no such prospect yet. Instead of responding to all kinds of criticism with historical excursions, the government should clearly state the goals of our state in this issue and the tools to achieve those goals instead of what the RPA members did 10 years ago or the ARF members did 100 years ago. In particular, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs mentioned by them seems to me to be a non-functioning tool.
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…Getting acquainted with the official rhetoric of Baku, let me say that Hrant Bagratyan’s predictions are not so fantasy-like.
Aram Abrahamyan
