The two men met in Moscow for the first time since Pashinian’s party scored a landslide victory in the June 20 elections which were called to end a serious political crisis caused by the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Putin congratulated Pashinian on that victory in his opening remarks at the talks held in the Kremlin.
“I think that … very acute and sensitive issues requiring a solution can be solved only in case of being able to work effectively,” he said. “The most important thing for that is to have the people’s trust. As the election results showed, you do have it.”
“At such difficult moments in the life of a country, this is probably the most important condition for further development,” he said.
Putin added that he is going to speak with Pashinian about “all issues which we have discussed in detail lately and which require our solution.”
For his part, Pashinian noted that the situation in the Karabakh conflict zone is “not very stable” despite Moscow’s efforts to cement the Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the war in November. He pointed to a continuing military standoff at some sections of the Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan.
No details of the talks and an ensuing working dinner between the two leaders were immediately made public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the day that they will discuss the situation in and around Karabakh and Russian-Armenian relations.
Putin telephoned Pashinian on June 24 to discuss Russian-backed plans to restore transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan envisaged by the truce accord. He also spoke with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev by phone June 23.
“Special attention was paid to intensifying work in a trilateral format on the restoration of economic links and transport routes in the South Caucasus,” the Kremlin said in statement on Putin’s phone call with Aliyev.
At their January 11 meeting in Moscow, Putin, Aliyev and Pashinian agreed to set up a trilateral working group tasked with working out practical modalities of reopening the Armenian-Azerbaijani border for commercial traffic.
The group co-headed by deputy prime ministers of the three states held several meetings in the following months. It has not met since Azerbaijani troops crossed several sections of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border on May 12-14.