Senior Russian lawmakers on Wednesday strongly condemned Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan for criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during a meeting of his counterparts from European Union member states held in Spain earlier this week.
Simonyan, who is a key political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, attended and addressed the gathering amid a continuing deterioration of Armenia’s relationship with Russia.
“Given the conference’s focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Middle East conflict, I want to restate that Armenia firmly upholds the territorial integrity of Ukraine as well as that of Moldova, Georgia, Cyprus and all other states,” he said.
He went on to accuse Moscow of meddling in Armenia’s internal affairs through a “campaign of threats and disinformation” directed at his country’s leadership.
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The pro-Kremlin speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Valentina Matvienko, reacted furiously to his speech, saying that the Federation Council will demand an official explanation from the Armenian parliament.
“I would like to ask my colleague, the president of the Armenian parliament, a question: on whose behalf did he voice such stories?” she said. “Certainly not on behalf of the Armenian people with whom Russia has a centuries-old friendship. We cannot ignore this kind of Russophobic speeches.”
“It is simply shameful that our colleague has already crossed all the red lines,” Matvienko added, according to the TASS news agency.
Grigory Karasin, the chairman of the Federation Council’s committee on foreign relations, likewise charged that Simonyan “crossed all conceivable and inconceivable boundaries.”
“We view the statements about Russia’s ‘invasion’ as well as ‘Armenia’s resolute defense of the territorial integrity of Ukraine’ as a direct show of solidarity with the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv,” Karasin said.
Armenian leaders were until recently careful not to openly criticize the Russian invasion. Pashinyan voiced such criticism during a February visit to Germany, underscoring Yerevan’s deepening rift with Moscow. The Kremlin reacted cautiously to that move.
Pashinyan made a point of talking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a European summit in Spain last October. A couple of weeks later, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian, attended multilateral peace talks in Malta initiated by Ukraine and sponsored by Western powers.
The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned at the time the “demonstrative anti-Russian gesture of official Yerevan.” The ministry has repeatedly accused Pashinyan’s administration of “destroying” Russian-Armenian relations.