Ahead of his visit to Moscow and meeting with President Vladimir Putin Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has called for developing “much more strategic and cooperative” relations with Russia.
In an exclusive interview with the ‘Armed Forces’ TV program of Armenia’s Ministry of Defense Pashinian stressed that relations with Russia have a special importance for the South Caucasus nation.
The head of the Armenian government expressed a hope that the efficiency of these relations is going to increase substantially.
“Our relations should be at a much higher level, they should be much more strategic, much more cooperative and much more brotherly,” said Pashinian.
The interview is to be broadcast on Armenian television on Saturday night. The prime minister’s spokesperson Arman Yeghoyan has published a short part from the interview on his Facebook account.
Negotiations between the Russian president and the Armenian prime minister are scheduled to be held in Moscow on September 8.
This will be the third meeting of the two leaders after Pashinian, then an outspoken oppositionist and anticorruption campaigner, was elected Armenia’s prime minister on the wave of anti-government protests last May.
Putin will host the Armenian leader a week after meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the southern Russian city of Sochi. Analysts expect, therefore, that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue will feature prominently at the upcoming Armenian-Russian talks.
Along with the United States and France, Russia co-chairs the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, which is the principal international format advancing peace efforts on settling the protracted Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
During the past weeks Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov twice publicly denounced prosecutions against former Armenian officials after the change of government in Yerevan, arguing that they ran counter to the new Armenian leadership’s earlier pledges not to “persecute its predecessors for political motives.”
Among the prosecuted officials are also former president Robert Kocharian and former deputy defense minister Yuri Khachaturov, both of whom are charged with breaching the constitutional order during the deadly post-election events in 2008.
Khachaturov currently chairs the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), of which Armenia is also a member. After launching a criminal probe in relation to Khachaturov in late July Yerevan initiated a procedure to recall the colonel-general from the top CSTO post. Analysts do not rule out that this issue is also going to be addressed at the Moscow talks.
In a live Facebook broadcast last Sunday Prime Minister Pashinian downplayed problems in Yerevan’s relations with Moscow, describing them as a “work process in its natural course.”
Earlier this week, Pashinian also downplayed the significance of political implications behind Putin’s birthday congratulations to Kocharian on August 31, which were taken by some analysts as a sign of Moscow’s apparent backing for the former Armenian leader who announced his return to active politics earlier last month.
Facebook Forum