Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will pay a working visit to France on November 10-11, his press office said on Friday.
In the French capital Pashinian is due to attend a ceremony dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the armistice in World War I and take part in a session of the Paris Peace Forum.
The events will be hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and will bring together a number of world leaders, including United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Armistice of November 11, 1918 put an end to fighting on land, sea and air in World War I between the Allies [France, the United Kingdom, the United States and others] and their opponent, Germany.
It marked a victory for the Allies, with previous armistices eliminating Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the war.
An estimated 11 million soldiers and about 8 million civilians were killed during the four-year war waged by the world’s leading powers of the time.
Armenians, then a people divided between two opposing empires – Ottoman Turkey and Russia – suffered severe consequences of the war.
Some 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman authorities during the years of World War I in what many historians and more than two dozen governments of the world today recognize as the first genocide of the 20th century.
Pashinian’s visit to Paris will be his third since assuming the post of Armenia’s prime minister in May.
In September, Pashinian went to France for talks with Macron ahead of the summit of Francophonie nations that was held in Yerevan the following month and was attended by the French leader.
On October 5, the Armenian leader visited Paris for a national homage to Charles Aznavour, a world-renowned French-Armenian crooner who had died at the age of 94.
Pashinian attended that ceremony jointly with Macron.
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