Gagik Melkonian accused Moscow of adopting a pro-Azerbaijani position on transport links between the two South Caucasus states when he spoke to journalists in the National Assembly.
“Haven’t you felt that?” said the retired general. “I haven’t seen the West put pressure on us, but I can see that Russia has brought up the issue of the corridor so that they have a corridor with Azerbaijan.”
Melkonian said that he is therefore not looking forward to a fresh meeting of Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s leaders which Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly trying to organize before the end of this month.
A newspaper controlled by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian made similar claims earlier this month. But neither Armenian government officials nor senior parliamentarians representing Pashinian’s Civil Contract party have echoed them in public.
Armenian opposition leaders questioned the credibility of Melkonian’s claims. Tigran Abrahamian of the Pativ Unem alliance said they contradict the Pashinian government’s continuing statements about its commitment to “allied relations” with Russia.
“If … Russia is really working against Armenia’s interests in so many directions, then that presupposes a significant downgrade of the political level of Russian-Armenian relations, which hasn’t been done,” said Abrahamian.
“I don’t see that the Kremlin is pushing the corridor issue,” said Seyran Ohanian, the parliamentary leader of another opposition bloc, Hayastan. Ohanian said he is worried instead about what he called Western efforts to get Armenia to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are to reopen their border to commercial and passenger traffic under the terms of a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped their six-week war for Nagorno-Karabakh in November 2020.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has claimed that the deal calls for a permanent overland link between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan exclave passing through Armenia’s Syunik province. Yerevan maintains that it envisages only conventional transport links.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk appeared to have backed the Armenian government’s position on the issue in a newspaper interview published on September 30.
Overchuk stressed that a Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani task force never discussed any “extraterritorial corridors.” He said that it agreed on another principle whereby “sovereignty over a road is exercised by the country through whose territory the road passes.”
“In practice, the implementation of this principle means that in order to enter the territory of Armenia from Azerbaijan via unblocked or newly built roads, border and passport control measures will be the same as, for example, when entering Armenia from Iran,” Overchuk told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.