The Armenian government reported an agreement to that effect following Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s latest talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin held in Moscow on Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Pashinian said the border guards will leave the Agarak crossing by January 1.
The agreement came just over two months after the Russians completed their withdrawal from Yerevan’s Zvartnots international airport, which was demanded by Pashinian’s government in March amid heightened tensions with Moscow. Andranik Kocharian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on defense and security, said it will boost a “component of our sovereignty.”
Kocharian also stressed the importance of another agreement reportedly reached by Pashinian and Putin. According to Yerevan, they agreed that starting from next year Armenian border guards “will also participate in the protection” of their country’s borders with Iran and Turkey together with their Russian colleagues.
Kocharian would not be drawn on the scale of that participation. Nor did he say whether Armenia has the capacity to deploy a large number of security personnel along the Turkish and Iranian borders.
The lawmaker, who represents Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, also indicated that the Russian borders guards will remain stationed there in the years to come and that the Armenian side will not rush to fully replace them.
“There are [Russian-Armenian] interstate agreements on the [Armenian] state border and those agreements must remain in force until they expire,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “We have to be ready to do that border patrol ourselves after that.”
“This transition from the Russian border guard troops to the Armenian border guard troops will take a lot of time from us,” he said without specifying possible time frames.
Russia also has a military base in Armenia. So far Pashinian has signaled no plans to seek its closure despite freezing his country’s membership in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and trying to reorient it towards the West.