The West is tearing another ally away from Russia
Under the new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia will continue to drift to the West and may leave the Eurasian Union.
Alexey Fenenko, associate professor at the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University, writes about this in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. M.V. Lomonosov.
“In Armenia, a whole generation of young (and not so young) politicians grew up, brought up on American and European grants... In a sense, Sargsyan repeated the fate of President Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, who also tried to balance between Russia and the West, raised a pro-Western elite and was ultimately overthrown by her. The current leadership of Armenia, the Sargsyan-Pashinyan tandem, will obviously be more pro-Western than Sargsyan, who was balancing (otherwise why would he be overthrown?),” the publication says.
“The new government of Armenia also included officials whose careers were connected with international Western organizations. It is unlikely that this tandem will immediately break with Russia. But gradually, Armenia will most likely begin to distance itself from “Eurasian structures”. Several military-political crises may emerge here. The first crisis may arise around the EAEU. The Association Agreement with the EU objectively raises the question of the prospects for Armenia's membership in this organization. This is compounded by growing criticism of the EAEU in Armenia itself, which allegedly, as a number of Armenian economists claim, even hinders its development. Armenia may well change the format of its membership in the EAEU: from an associate member to a complete withdrawal from it,” the author predicts.
“The second crisis may occur when resolving the Karabakh issue...Russia will be faced with a difficult choice: either agree with Armenia’s distancing towards the West, or support Yerevan stronger than the West,” the expert notes.
“Russia risks facing a politically difficult situation. Support for the new, pro-Western government in Yerevan will negate all the positive results of the dialogue with Azerbaijan and Turkey, which Moscow has patiently built over the past 15 years. At the same time, Armenia itself will continue to drift to the West, increasingly diverging from the EAEU and the CSTO. Moscow will actually support a government aimed at moving away from Russia itself and strengthening the role of Western structures in Transcaucasia,” the author writes.
English version :: Read in English The West is tearing another ally away from Russia