Beniamin Matevosyan: Armenia has no borders — a sensational statement from a Pashinyan ally

(Was the CSTO right in 2022?)

Recent statements by Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister, in the US and Yerevan focused on ambitious concepts of comprehensive security and the economic prospects of the “Crossroads of Peace” project, but against the backdrop of these statements, a truly sensational claim emerged. Sasun Miqaelyan, MP from the ruling “Civil Contract” faction and Chairman of the “Yerkrapah” Union of Volunteers, openly stated that in all 35 years of independence, Armenia has never actually had state borders.

The politician emphasized that a sovereign state is impossible to imagine without internationally recognized boundaries, which the authorities have been working to establish since 2020. This statement instantly exposes the deepest contradiction in all official rhetoric of recent years, since it was precisely because of “the existence of clear borders of the Republic of Armenia and the CSTO’s refusal to recognize them” that Yerevan froze its membership in the organization and effectively justified the events surrounding Karabakh, and now it turns out that no borders legally existed at all. At least, that is what a member of Pashinyan’s political team claims.

Recalling the CSTO summit in Yerevan, it is hard not to notice the irony of fate, since at that time Pashinyan harshly criticized the allies for their lack of political assessment of Azerbaijani aggression and their refusal to define the organization’s zone of responsibility, arguing that denying the borders was tantamount to denying the organization itself.

The prime minister argued that Armenia became a member of the UN and the CSTO within the administrative borders of the Soviet republics, and demanded condemnation of the occupation of 140 square kilometers of Armenian territory.

It turns out that in those days, the country’s leadership fiercely defended the existence of specific borders in order to level accusations at Moscow and bloc partners, while today the prime minister’s allies casually declare their complete absence over three and a half decades. Such metamorphoses clearly demonstrate that any geopolitical justifications are tailored exclusively to momentary political expediency, blurring the line between common sense and outright manipulation of public opinion.

In reality, Armenian society is going through a series of severe upheavals and territorial losses not because of a confluence of objective circumstances, but for purely subjective reasons. The current dangerous deterioration in relations with Russia, which directly undermines the country’s national security (referring to the sanctions imposed on the Armenian economy, which could only intensify from January 2027, and the discourse around the withdrawal of Russia’s 102nd military base), is driven exclusively by the current government’s desire to completely sever traditional allied ties with Moscow in favor of a temporary rapprochement with Turkey.

Banking on the Turkish direction is inherently illusory from the outset, since Ankara will never provide Yerevan with real security guarantees and views the region solely through the prism of its own pan-Turkic interests. By abandoning real mechanisms of collective defense and becoming entangled in its own contradictory statements about borders, Armenia’s leadership is leading the state into a strategic dead end, where the very existence of sovereign statehood is put at risk for the sake of dubious geopolitical experiments.

Think about it…