The National Security Service (NSS) insisted on Wednesday that Russia was not responsible for the fact that a Ukrainian lawmaker was briefly prevented from entering Armenia after landing at Yerevan airport last week.
The lawmaker, Mustafa Nayyem, flew to Yerevan on April 30 to attend a conference as a private person. He told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on May 1 that it took more than two hours before he was allowed to leave the Zvartnots international airport.
Nayyem said immigration officers there told him that he had been barred from entering Armenia at the request of “a third country.” “After the [Ukrainian] consulate and the organizers of the conference intervened, I was finally allowed to enter Armenia for once,” he said.
Nayyem said he was later told by Armenian politicians and Ukrainian Embassy officials that Russia and Armenia are in coordination regarding Ukrainian citizens who are on Moscow's sanctions list.
The NSS director, Artur Vanetsian, dismissed Nayyem’s claims about Russian interference as “disinformation.” But he did confirm that the lawmaker was on an NSS list of “undesirable” individuals banned from entering Armenia.
“As soon as I was told that such an incident has occurred the issue was sorted out and Mustafa Nayyem entered Armenia,” Nayyem told RFE/RL’s Armenian service. “And Mustafa Nayyem stayed at the airport for roughly 40 minutes. There had been no interference by Russia.”
Vanetsian claimed that the Ukrainian politician critical of Moscow had been blacklisted by the NSS because of a “technical error.” He said that the blacklist contained the names of as many as 30,000 foreign nationals and that he significantly shortened it after being appointed as head of the security service one year ago.
Artur Sakunts, an Armenian human rights activist, dismissed this explanation, challenging the NSS to clarify why it regarded Nayyem as an “undesirable” person in the first place. Sakunts said he believes Russian authorities had told Yerevan to blacklist Nayyem because of the latter’s strong condemnations of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014.