Russian-Armenian relations are “developing very successfully,” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said late on Wednesday when he met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian amid heightened tensions between their countries.
Putin pointed to Russia’s soaring trade with Armenia in his opening remarks at the talks held following a Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) summit in Moscow.
“Armenia’s trade with the [other countries of the] Eurasian Economic Union has increased 14 times [since 2015,]” he said. “As for bilateral relations, they are also developing very successfully. We always first of all pay attention to economic cooperation.”
Russian-Armenian trade, he went on, reached a record level of more than $7 billion last year. Its rapid growth was driven in large measure by Armenia’s re-export of Western-manufactured goods to Russia.
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“Obviously there are issues related to not only to the rising trade. There are issues concerning security in the region. We won’t talk about them in detail in an open format now. But this is an opportunity to talk about the whole scope of our relations, including regional security issues, on the sidelines of the EEU meeting,” added Putin.
“We last met in December last year. Since then, issues that need to be discussed have accumulated,” Pashinian said, for his part.
The tete-a-tete meeting continued behind the closed doors. No concrete agreements were announced by the two sides right after it.
The Russian-Armenian relationship has steadily deteriorated in recent years and especially since last September, with Yerevan accusing Moscow of not honoring its security commitments to its South Caucasus ally and seeking closer ties with the West. The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly denounced the pro-Western tilt in Armenia’s foreign policy, saying that Pashinian’s government is systematically “destroying” bilateral ties.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov downplayed the unprecedented rift between the two longtime allies when he spoke to Russian state television during or shortly before Putin’s latest talks with Pashinian. He said both sides have the “political will” to tackle their differences.
“Therefore, in this case we are rather inclined to be optimistic,” Peskov said, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.