Russia on Wednesday strongly denied Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s claims that it fomented antigovernment protests in Yerevan and defended Russian border guards stationed in Armenia against criticism from another Armenian official.
Speaking to the France 24 TV channel during a visit to Paris last week, Pashinyan charged that in the wake of Azerbaijan’s recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh last September “Russia’s most high-ranking representatives” encouraged Armenians to take to the streets and topple him. He did not name any of those officials or give concrete examples of such calls.
“The Armenian prime minister’s claims mentioned you have no basis,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters. “Russian officials have never allowed even a hint of calls for the overthrow of legally elected authorities anywhere.”
“A logical question arises: do those who are now in power in Yerevan themselves adhere to such logic with respect to other countries or their own internal political process? I think it would be nice to talk about this topic. We remember the most recent history, what happened a few years ago,” Zakharova said in an apparent scathing reference to Pashinian-led mass protests that brought down Armenia’s previous government in 2018.
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In his interview with the French public broadcaster, Pashinian also declared that Armenia has essentially “frozen” its membership in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). But he again stopped short of announcing plans to pull Armenia out of the CSTO and demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. His domestic critics say he will eventually do so.
In what some of them described as the first step towards that, Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonian slammed on Tuesday the Russian border guards and other military personnel, saying that they do not protect Armenia against Azerbaijani attacks.
Simonyan, who is a key member of Pashinyan’s political team, said they must be removed from Yerevan’s Zvartnots international airport.
“We regard this as another example of unfriendly behavior of representatives of official Yerevan,” Zakharova said, adding that Moscow has “not received any requests from the Armenian authorities on this score.”
She condemned the “attempts to denigrate” the border guards that have for decades been deployed along Armenia’s borders with Turkey and Iran as well as at Zvartnots. During and after the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, they were also deployed, along with Russian army units, to some sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
RFE/RL’s Armenian Service