Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, made the statement in March 2022 just days after Azerbaijani troops seized a Karabakh village and tried to push deeper into the Armenian-populated territory, sparking deadly fighting with Karabakh Armenian forces. They reportedly used Turkish Bayraktar drones during the clashes stopped by Russian peacekeepers.
“Bayraktars are not only destroying the orcs (Russian invaders) on our territory, they have worked in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Danilov told Ukrainian television. “Armenia is now appealing to the Russian Federation to help with troops. But they removed troops from there and sent them to our country last week.”
Danilov went on to mention Russia’s long-running dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands, which again came to the fore after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“How this situation will end is still unknown,” he said. “But if second fronts are opened for the Russian Federation, which itself artificially created them during its short history, they will help us very significantly,” he said.
Danilov’s remarks raised eyebrows in Armenia. Some local commentators accused Ukraine of openly encouraging Azerbaijan to attack and fully occupy Karabakh despite the presence of Russian peacekeeping forces there.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Zelenskiy, commented on the remarks in an interview with told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“There is an official position of the [Ukrainian] state which can be publicly voiced, including on various international platforms, by the foreign ministry,” he said via video link from Kyiv. “This is very important. The foreign ministry will formulate our position, including on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.”
“Comments that are now made on one or another conflict, including Nagorno-Karabakh, are often purely speculative and do not reflect Ukraine’s official position,” added Podolyak.
At the same time, the Ukrainian official blamed Russia for the unresolved ethnic and territorial disputes in the former Soviet Union.
“Russia is very often behind those conflicts and does not allow them to be resolved,” he said. “This is the logic behind what Mr. Danilov said. He is absolutely right on this issue.”
Podolyak also insisted that Ukraine had not supplied Azerbaijan with weapons -- and phosphorus bombs in particular -- used during the 2020 war in Karabakh. “Ukraine officially has a neutral status,” he said.
Ukraine’s current and former governments have repeatedly voiced support for Azerbaijan in the Karabakh conflict. For its part, Armenia has declined to vote for UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 aggression against Ukraine.