In recent days, Russia has repeatedly referred to the 3+3 regional platform at the level of the Foreign Ministry, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov himself. Moscow expects Yerevan and Baku to agree as soon as possible on the venue for the next ministerial meeting in the 3+3 format. At what remains the latest ministerial gathering of the format, held in Turkey in October 2024, it was announced that the next meeting would take place either in Yerevan or in Baku, depending on the agreement reached by the parties.
Since October 2024, however, Yerevan and Baku have reached understandings on numerous issues—not concerning the location of the next 3+3 ministerial meeting, but rather the so-called peace process, all the way to the TRIP. Meanwhile, the 3+3 format appears to have been largely forgotten, pushed into the shadows by other international developments. Until recently, Russia also seemed relatively inactive on the matter, yet over the past few days it has brought it up several times.
This suggests that Moscow sees a need for substantive discussions on the South Caucasus. Otherwise, it is unlikely that it would be emphasizing the issue with such persistence. That need probably stems from the intensified strikes against Russia from Ukraine, which are undoubtedly being carried out with the active support of NATO’s European members, whose summit was recently held in Turkey. Those actors are clearly raising the stakes in their confrontation with Russia. Moscow now faces the need to determine both the nature and the logic of its response.
At the same time, it has become vital for Russia to secure its “rear”—to minimize risks on what could be described as secondary fronts. In that respect, the South Caucasus has long been, and continues to be, one of the more sensitive directions.
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It is probably for this reason that Moscow is reviving the 3+3 agenda. If so, political bargaining is likely to follow. This raises the question of whether Armenia’s ruling force, which retained power despite, to put it mildly, a loss of electoral legitimacy, is prepared for such bargaining.
Or is that precisely what Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has been preparing for during his vacation—by reading Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, regarded as one of the masterpieces of Russian literature and often described as an “encyclopedia of Russian life”?
Hakob BADALYAN
