ArmInfo.The refusal of the United States and France to cooperate with the Russian Federation in the settlement of the Artsakh conflict in the format of the OSCE Minsk Group format forces Armenia and Azerbaijan to make a choice. Former Foreign Minister of Artsakh, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Arman Melikyan expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.
On April 8, at a briefing with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that he did not know what the fate of the OSCE Minsk Group Troika would be, citing the position of the United States and France as the reason. "Our French and American partners ( so-called partners in this group), in a Russophobic frenzy and in an effort to cancel everything related to the Russian Federation, said that they would not communicate with us in that format. This is their right. If they are ready to sacrifice their interests in the settlement in Karabakh and in the Transcaucasus as a whole, then this is their choice," he said.
"It is clear that such a demarche of the two OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries creates a fundamentally new situation in the negotiation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and taking into account the need for Yerevan and Baku to choose a new platform for negotiations, the situation is rather complicated. In any case, what happened is the refusal of Washington and Paris to cooperate with Moscow in this format, it was not a surprise for all of us," he stressed.
Summing up the results of the Brussels talks between Pashinyan and Aliyev, the diplomat concludes that the West has decided to deal with the settlement of problems between Armenia and Azerbaijan personally. Moreover, the flagship in this area of policy is the EU. However, even if the EU is indeed able to assist the process of a peaceful settlement of the conflict, Melikyan has no idea how the Europeans can bypass the Russian military, also non-military, presence in Artsakh, as well as in Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In this light, the diplomat also highlighted the EU's lack of its own foreign policy and military agenda separate from NATO and the US. The latter, in his opinion, gives rise to doubts about the ability of Brussels to promote the Armenian-Azerbaijani reconciliation in the conditions when Russian peacekeepers are "on the ground" in Artsakh. And the military-political and economic influence of Moscow on Yerevan and Baku is still quite large.
" In this light, one gets the impression that Brussels is only ready to create a platform for solving problems between Yerevan and Baku. Apparently, the EU does not consider the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its political settlement to be negotiated on its part. Regarding Artsakh, the EU prefers to confine itself to a rather vague mention of the humanitarian problems of Artsakh. Accordingly, we should clearly distinguish between Artsakh and the settlement through the mediation of Brussels, in fact, the problems between Yerevan and Baku. And how all these innovations will affect the settlement of the Artsakh problem, in fact, on its status it is premature to forecast today," the diplomat summed up.