The commission is specifically tasked with furthering “military-technical cooperation,” which mainly involves supplies of weapons and/or their joint manufacturing.
Opening the annual meeting, Armenian Deputy Defense Minister Karen Brutian stressed the importance of deepening Russian-Armenian relations in this area. Brutian expressed hope that the members of the joint task force will hold “productive discussions” over the next few days.
The Armenian Defense Ministry reported no other details of the meeting.
Russia has long been the principal supplier of weapons and other military equipment to Armenia.
In an apparent reference to Russia, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian complained last September that “our allies” have failed to deliver weapons to Armenia despite contracts worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” signed in the last two years. He did not shed light on those contracts.
Pashinian responded to opposition claims that his government has done little to rebuild the Armenian armed forces after the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.
Brutian visited Moscow and met with his Russian counterpart Alexander Fomin in November. No concrete agreements between the Russian and Armenian militaries were announced as a result of that trip.
Russian-Armenian relations have deteriorated since then because of what the Armenian government sees as a lack of Russian support in the conflict with Azerbaijan.
Pashinian suggested in January that the close military ties with Russia may be putting Armenia’s security and territorial integrity at greater risk. The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the claim as “absurd.”
The unprecedented tensions between the two allied states rose further late last week after Armenia’s Constitutional Court gave the green light for parliamentary ratification of the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty. The ruling came one week after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over war crimes allegedly committed by Russia in Ukraine.
Moscow warned on Monday that Yerevan’s recognition of The Hague tribunal’s jurisdiction would have “extremely negative” consequences for Russian-Armenian relations. The Armenian government did not publicly react to the stern warning as of Tuesday evening.
Some Armenian opposition figures claimed that Pashinian engineered the Constitutional Court ruling to score points among the Western powers at loggerheads with Russia.