Armenia is unlikely to get rid of Russian border guards anytime soon — Beniamin Poghosyan
January 25 2025, 17:41
Speaking with Alpha News, Beniamin Poghosyan, Senior Research Fellow at APRI Armenia, struggled to answer the question of whether Russian border guards would be able to protect Armenia in the event of Turkey’s attack.
“If Turkey decides to attack Armenia, can the presence of Russian border guards play a significant preventive role? In a military sense, I am not sure about this. In a political sense, there is also a military base here; that is, it is a political deterrent. Obviously, both the military base and the Russian border guards have the appropriate military capabilities to resist in the event of a possible Turkish attack,” he noted.
According to him, it is unlikely that Armenia will get rid of Russian border guards anytime soon.
“I am not sure that Armenia will get rid of these constraints anytime soon, not because it wants to or does not want to; the government must declare this. It is clear that our capabilities do not allow this. Ultimately, there is still a border with Azerbaijan, and there is a decision that gradually, at least in those areas where delimitation and demarcation are carried out, border guards will be deployed, not the army.
By the way, on the Azerbaijani side, border guards have been deployed in many areas for a long time, but let’s not forget that the border guards there are no different from the army. Therefore, if there is a need to strengthen the border guards—and there is indeed—then these means should be directed to those needs that will be used to replace the army on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border,” Beniamin Poghosyan noted.