Lukashenko urged ex-Soviet republics making up the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to close ranks in the face of what he described as the West’s attempts to “tear us to pieces.”
“First, Georgia left our grouping; de facto, Ukraine is not with us; and there are big questions about Moldova. Unfortunately, Armenia does not always behave like a partner,” he said during CIS summit in Bishkek shunned by Pashinian.
It was not clear whether he referred to the boycott or the Pashinian government’s broader tensions with Russia that have cast doubt on Armenia’s continued membership in Russian-led blocs.
As recently as on October 5, Pashinian and his Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan made a point of talking to exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya during a European Union summit in the Spanish city of Granada. Tsikhanouskaya tweeted the following day that she “expressed condolences in connection with the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh” and called for a lasting peace in the region.
Pashinian’s press office issued no statements on the brief meeting. Nor did the Belarusian government officially react to it.
Tsikhanouskaya was the main opposition candidate allowed to take part in a 2020 presidential election which handed Lukashenka a sixth term as president. The Belarusian opposition and the West have refused to recognize the results of the vote followed by anti-government protests and a brutal crackdown on its participants. Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus and currently lives in Lithuania.
As recently as in June, Lukashenko urged the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to address serious security concerns of Armenia and other CSTO member states. That contrasted with his earlier statements on Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan.
In particular, the long-serving strongman bluntly opposed in October 2022 any CSTO intervention in the conflict, which was demanded by Yerevan. Azerbaijan is not an adversary of Belarus and its President Ilham Aliyev is “totally our guy,” he said, sparking a fresh war of words between Yerevan and Minsk.
Lukashenko, who has a warm personal rapport with Aliyev, had repeatedly raised eyebrows in Armenia in the past with his pro-Azerbaijani statements and arms supplies to Baku. He appeared to welcome on Friday the Azerbaijani takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, saying that some of the “protracted conflicts” in the former Soviet Union have been “successfully overcome.”