“Zhamanak” cites the Kremlin as reporting on Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will discuss “key topics of the bilateral agenda” when they meet in Moscow on Thursday. The paper describes this wording as “quite telling and perhaps even unprecedented for high-level Russian-Armenian meetings.” “The Armenian society undoubtedly expects today’s meeting to answer some questions regarding the gas price, the situation around the CSTO,” it says.
Lragir.am says that Russian-Armenian relations “did not fully reflect Armenia’s national interests” before the Armenian “velvet revolution” and need to be “revised” now. “In the past two decades there have been many examples proving that,” writes the pro-Western public. “Those include the April [2016] war [in Karabakh.]” This is what Putin and Pashinian should discuss “in an open and mutually frank atmosphere,” it says, adding that they should make sure that their mutual rapport is unaffected by continuing “relations between Armenia’s former ruling system and the current Russian elite.”
“Aravot” suggests that cost cutting is the main purpose of Pashinian’s plans to reduce the number of government ministries and downsize the state bureaucracy. The paper says successive Armenian governments failed to forge adequate links with the Armenian Diaspora both before and after the creation of the Ministry of Diaspora in 2009. “The main problem is that the logic of the Soviet-era Diaspora Committee was preserved,” it explains in an editorial. “Events, toasts, oaths of unity and the like. That was absolutely justified in the absence of an independent Armenian state. These events may flatter some Diaspora Armenians but they have nothing to do with independent Armenia’s agenda. The same is true for the Ministry of Culture.”
(Lilit Harutiunian)
Facebook Forum