The danger is growing: results of Pashinyan’s visit to Moscow

During his visit to Estonia on April 27-28, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and laid flowers at the memorial wall. Just days later, on May 9, during his visit to Moscow, he attended a military parade on Red Square commemorating the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Following the parade, state leaders laid flowers at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier, with Pashinyan among them.

This is typical of Pashinyan, who tries to have it both ways. However, the events following his Moscow trip suggest that his visit did not yield the results he had hoped for as the leader of the Civil Contract party.

The evidence of this is the frenzied propaganda of Nazism that has unfolded on Armenian Public Television in recent days. Notably, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, head of the Command and Staff Institute at the Vazgen Sargsyan Military Academy and former press secretary of the Armenian Ministry of Defense, dismissed the notion that the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad prevented a potential Turkish invasion of Armenia. He also mentioned the German Gertrude plan, which envisioned a hypothetical invasion of Turkey by the Third Reich troops and the alleged re-creation of Historical Armenia.

Fascism was rehabilitated on Armenian Public Television because “nothing happened” in Moscow: Pashinyan did not have a private meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This failure to win Moscow’s support ahead of the National Assembly elections has seemingly fueled an intensified wave of Russophobic sentiment in Armenian media.

Putin’s attitude towards Pashinyan and messages from the Russian media (when Pashinyan was even referred to as the “president of Azerbaijan”) indicate that Moscow is distancing itself from Pashinyan as a “toxic political element” whose anti-rating could hit Russia hard if his name in Armenian society is associated with the official Kremlin. This cannot but worry Pashinyan.

Moreover, if his team is finally convinced that Pashinyan is persona non grata for Moscow, then they may change their political stance faster than Usain Bolt running a hundred-meter dash.

All this is possible, especially since there have already been such precedents in the history of independent Armenia: in the 2000s, Aram Sargsyan criticized Robert Kocharyan for his complementarity, stating that “there is no alternative to an alliance with Russia and integration into the CSTO structures”. Today, the same person “leads Armenia to the EU” by collecting signatures to bring the country into the “family of civilized European states.”

Think about it…