Azatutyun.am. Armenia is moving away from Russia and seeking closer links with NATO, according to a senior official from the U.S.-led alliance.
“Armenia has decided very clearly to make some shift in their foreign policy, to take some distance from Moscow,” Javier Colomina, the NATO secretary general’s special representative for the South Caucasus and Central Asia, told Georgian state television in an interview aired on Monday. “We have welcomed that.”
“Armenia’s citizens are free to make decisions and this is what they have decided. In my view, Armenia has already started moving closer to us,” Colomina said, adding that Yerevan is now asking NATO for “more cooperation and political dialogue.”
“We were and remain part of a security architecture which has demonstrated its inefficiency, and any rational sovereign state would draw conclusions from that and try to use new tools for ensuring its security,” Arsen Torosian, an Armenian lawmaker from the ruling Civil Contract party, said in this regard on Tuesday.
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Torosian did not clarify whether that means Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government could eventually pull Armenia out of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Pashinian declared in early September that his government is trying to “diversify our security policy” because Armenia’s long-standing heavy reliance on Russia has proved a “strategic mistake.” He claimed that Moscow is “unwilling or unable” to defend its South Caucasus ally. Russia denounced this and other “unfriendly steps,” accusing Pashinian of “destroying” Russian-Armenian relations at the behest of the West.
Despite mounting tensions between the two longtime allies, Pashinian and other Armenian officials insisted afterwards that they have no plans to change Armenia’s foreign policy “vector.” The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed these assurances in late November as Pashinian boycotted a summit of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin downplayed the rift between Moscow and Yerevan earlier this month. The Russian ambassador to Armenia similarly said last week that the two nations remain “strategic allies.”