“There is one certainty now. No one can fail to see that that Russia has betrayed the Armenian population,” Michel told the Euronews TV network in an interview partly aired on Tuesday.
“Russia expressed the wish to have soldiers on the ground to guarantee these security agreements,” he said in an apparent reference to the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire. “And we see that this military operation was launched without the slightest reaction from Russia, which was on the ground and which was not the case for the European Union that has no military force present on the ground.”
The Armenian government urged Russian peacekeeping forces to step in to protect Karabakh’s population hours after the Azerbaijani army launched the offensive on September 19. Russian officials ruled out such intervention. A senior Armenian official charged that the peacekeepers failed to protect Karabakh’s population contrary to their “obligations” spelled out in the 2020 truce accord brokered by Moscow.
Unlike the European Union and the United States, Russia refrained from criticizing the Azerbaijani assault. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on September 20 that Baku took the military action within Azerbaijan’s “de jure territory.”
Peskov and other Russian officials maintain that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian sealed the fate of Karabakh when he agreed to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over the enclave during summits organized by Michel in October 2022 and May 2023.
Some members of the European Parliament have said the EU could have also prevented the hostilities in Karabakh by imposing sanctions on Baku during the nine-month Azerbaijani blockade of the Lachin corridor.
Michel gave no indications that the EU could impose such sanctions now. Azerbaijan remains a “partner” for the 27-nation bloc even if their relationship is “not simple,” the president of the European Council told Euronews.
Michel is expected to host another meeting of Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on the sidelines of an EU summit in Granada, Spain that will take place on Thursday. They will be joined by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Senior aides to the five leaders met in Brussels last week in preparation for the talks that will focus on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.