The first batch of over two dozen Bastion vehicles apparently bound for Armenia was spotted in the Georgian port of Poti and reported by Azerbaijani media about a month ago. The Armenian Defense Ministry declined to explicitly confirm the delivery.
The APCs manufactured by the French company Arquus were not part of defense contracts signed by French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu and his Armenian counterpart Suren Papikian during the latter’s visit to Paris in late October.
One of those deal calls for Armenia’s purchase of three air-defense radar systems from the French defense group Thales. Lecornu and Papikian also signed a “letter of intent” on the future delivery of Mistral short-range surface-to-air missiles.
In a joint report on a French budgetary bill, two members of France’s Senate revealed that “24 Bastion-type armored vehicles … are being delivered to Armenia and they should be joined by 26 other vehicles of the same type currently in production.”
The senators, Hugues Saury and Helene Conway-Mouret, said French arms supplies to Armenia should not be confined to “defensive” equipment.
“This distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is not very practical in reality, as has been demonstrated by the war in Ukraine. Let us not repeat the same mistakes by belatedly delivering equipment that could be necessary right from the beginning,” says their report submitted to the French upper house of parliament late last month.
Saury and Conway-Mouret indicated in this regard that Yerevan wants to acquire French artillery systems as well. Paris should therefore consider providing 155-milimeter CAESAR self-propelled howitzers to the Armenian military, they said.
Azerbaijan condemned the French-Armenian arms deals earlier in November, saying that they will “bolster Armenia’s military potential and its ability to carry out destructive operations in the region.”
Armenian officials countered that Yerevan’s arms acquisitions are a response to an Azerbaijani military build-up which has continued even after the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. They argued that Azerbaijan’s military budget is three times bigger than Armenia’s. Israeli media reported around the same time that Baku has purchased more Israeli Barak air-defense systems in a deal worth as much as $1.2 billion.
In the past several months, Azerbaijani cargo planes have reportedly carried out dozens of more flights to and from Israel’s only airfield through which explosives can be flown into and out of the country. According to the Haaretz daily, the frequency of such flights spiked in the run-up to Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Karabakh.