The Foreign Ministry of Belarus summoned an Armenian diplomat on Wednesday after its embassy in Yerevan was pelted with eggs in protest against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s latest anti-Armenian statement.
Lukashenko mocked Armenia and denounced its political leadership for seeking closer ties with the West in an interview with Russian state television aired earlier this week.
“Who needs the Armenians besides us?” he said. “No one needs them. Let them develop their economy and focus on what they have.”
The Armenian government has not yet publicly reacted to Lukashenko’s comments made over two months after a major diplomatic spat between the two ex-Soviet states.
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A group of activists of Hanun Hanrapetutyan, a small pro-Western party loyal to the government, gathered outside the Belarusian Embassy on Wednesday morning to condemn Lukashenko. They threw eggs, potatoes and tomatoes at the embassy gate during the protest.
“You don’t decide who needs the Armenians. Thank God, we don’t need you and you don’t need us either,” one of the protesters, Ruben Mehrabyan, said, appealing to the Belarusian leadership.
Later in the day, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned the Armenian charge d’affaires in Minsk to condemn “the act of vandalism” against its mission and demand that Armenian law-enforcement authorities punish its perpetrators. It also criticized the authorities for not preventing the incident.
In a joint statement with two other pro-Western fringe groups, Hanun Hanrapetutyan demanded that Armenia severe diplomatic ties with Belarus, its nominal ally in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and Eurasian Economic Union.
Yerevan recalled the Armenian ambassador in Minsk for consultations on June 14 one month after Lukashenko made fresh pro-Azerbaijani statements during a visit to Azerbaijan. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian declared that he and other Armenian officials will not visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko remains in power. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry scoffed at the move, saying that Pashinian wants to deflect public attention from massive anti-government protests in Yerevan.
During his May visit to Azerbaijan, Lukashenko said that he had not only been aware of Baku’s plans to try to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh by force but also approved them during his meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held before the 2020 war. The Belarusian strongman, in power since 1994, has long raised eyebrows in Armenia with his pro-Azerbaijani comments on the Karabakh conflict and arms sales to Baku.
In March this year, Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonian met in Brussels with Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader who challenged Lukashenko in a 2020 presidential election. Pashinian and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan also made a point of speaking with Tsikhanouskaya during a European summit in Spain last October.