The U.S. Department of Defense listed Armenia on Wednesday among 26 nations that will send troops to the Defender 23 exercise designed to “deter those who would threaten the peace of Europe and defend the continent from aggression.” It removed the South Caucasus country from the list, posted on the Pentagon’s website, on Thursday without any explanation.
The Armenian Defense Ministry declined to comment on that. The ministry spokesman, Aram Torosian, said only that Armenian soldiers will likely participate instead in two other, more small-scale drills that are due to be organized by U.S. Army Europe and Africa later this year.
One of those drills will involve multinational troops making up KFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Torosian said in written comments. A small Armenian military contingent has been part of KFOR for nearly two decades.
It thus remained unclear whether Yerevan had initially agreed to join the Defender 23 war games before deciding to pull out of them.
Hakob Badalian, an Armenian political analyst, suggested that Armenia’s initial inclusion on the list of participants was hardly the result of a U.S. “technical” error.
“I don’t think it’s a technical issue,” Badalian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “The question of why that happened is very important.”
Armenia has long been allied to Russia, which claims to have faced growing “hostility” from NATO and the United States in particular since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Armenia’s relations with Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) have deteriorated in recent months due to what Yerevan sees as a lack of support from its allies in the conflict with Azerbaijan.
Earlier this year, the Armenian government cancelled a CSTO military exercise planned in Armenia and refused to appoint a deputy secretary-general of the Russian-led military alliance. It also rejected other CSTO member states’ offer to deploy a monitoring mission to the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
