Sergey Panteleyev: We welcome the fact that the Armenian people are waking up from a certain trance

Speaking with Alpha News, political scientist Sergey Panteleyev commented on the protests against the current government in Armenia and Russia’s current role in the South Caucasus region.

According to the expert, this wave of protests will be called a national struggle against the deprivation of Armenians’ right to their own cultural and historical code.

“We recently went to Etchmiadzin, and I saw the depth of Armenian history. There is a very clear understanding that the history of Armenia, an ancient Christian country, is deeply connected with the church, with the struggle for Armenian stones, for a beautiful land. And suddenly you realize that the government, which represents the ancient Christian people, consistently abandons such basic things as the Armenian Genocide or its own territory. Then, it declares the Armenian Apostolic Church almost some kind of foreign agent. What is this even about?! So, it seems to me that this wave of protests will be called a national struggle against the deprivation of the right of Armenians and Armenia to their own history, to their own face, to their own cultural and historical code,” Panteleyev said.

According to the expert, Russia is interested in having countries next to it that defend their position and have sovereignty.

“I remember very well how the government of a young reformer in the Russian Federation, in particular Yegor Gaidar, wrote about the need to abandon the Russian cultural and historical code, which carries a totalitarian principle, and proposed becoming a Western-style republic. We know how it ended. In 1993, we were on the brink of civil war. The 1990s are perceived as the darkest time, and President Vladimir Putin simply pulled the country out of this abyss. There is an example of Ukraine, where today absolutely the same forces are acting in exactly the same way as now in Armenia. They are fighting Orthodoxy, seizing Orthodox churches, and denying deep history. This leads not only to a deep crisis of identity, culture, and economy but also to a real civil war, which the project’s sponsors use for their own purposes.

This is a project of abandoning one’s own identity, a project of pitting people against each other to solve their own geopolitical problems. I am afraid that these direct analogies are extremely relevant for Armenia today because I do not see a fundamental difference between the actions of Zelensky and Pashinyan. Even from the point of view of the sponsor of these projects, this is one technology, and therefore they are fighting tradition because tradition for them is a hostile principle. They are puppets of a project that wants to remove even the concept of sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty for them is a danger. So, Russia is interested in having countries next to it that defend their position, that have the right to national pride, to their own position, and have a subjectivity with which it is possible to negotiate. Russia acts as a defender of sovereignty,” Panteleyev noted.

According to the expert, there is hope that Armenians themselves will become moderators of the process related to the protection of their own statehood.

“Russia is definitely not interested in leaving the region and having a conflict here. Russia is interested in the fact that the main guarantor of preventing an explosion in the South Caucasus region will be those forces that are sovereign and independent states. For our part, we welcome the fact that the Armenian people are waking up from a certain trance. There is hope that the Armenians themselves will become moderators of the process related to the protection of their own statehood, and here, of course, both the Russian people and the Russian state will support this process in every possible way.

I hope that we will finally remember that we are true allies, and together we will defend our historical path,” Panteleyev concluded.