President Serzh Sarkisian on Wednesday voiced fresh concerns about large-scale deliveries of Russian weapons to Azerbaijan, saying that they could damage the traditionally close Russian-Armenian relations.
“The fact that Russia sells weapons to Azerbaijan for various reasons worries us,” Sarkisian told an international media forum held in Yerevan.
“The problem here is not the quality of the sold weapons,” he said during a question-and-answer session that followed his speech at the gathering. “The problem is that the young Armenian man deployed on our border [with Azerbaijan] or the [Nagorno-Karabakh] Line of Contact realizes that they are trying to kill him with Russian weapons. This is the gravest thing.”
Russia appears to have supplied more heavy weapons to Azerbaijan than Armenia, its main regional ally, in the past several years. Those include hundreds of tanks, artillery systems and combat helicopters. Russian and Azerbaijani officials have estimated the total volume of bilateral defense contracts signed since 2010 at more than $4 billion.
Sarkisian already voiced dismay at the Russian-Azerbaijani arms deals in a newspaper interview in July 2014. “Our people are worried that our strategic ally sells weapons to Azerbaijan,” Sarkisian told Argentina’s “Clarin” daily.
Official Yerevan was until then careful not to publicly criticize the Russian arms supplies to its arch-foe. Some Armenian officials claimed that they are offset by Russian military assistance to Armenia.
Sarkisian similarly praised this and other forms of Russian aid provided to his country since independence. He went on to assert that Azerbaijan remains unable to “solve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by military means.”
Answering another question, Sarkisian strongly defended his controversial 2013 decision to opt for Armenia’s membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) at the expense of a far-reaching accord with the European Union. He attributed the move to “pragmatic” economic considerations, singling out the fact Armenia imports Russian natural gas at a discounted price and has unfettered access to the vast Russian market.