According to the office of Kyrgyz President Sadyr Zhaparov, Pashinian notified him about the decision in a phone call, attributing it to “a number of circumstances.” Pashinian participated in the European Union’s October 5 summit in Spain and is due to address the European Parliament next week.
The Armenian government did not issue any statements on the call with Zhaparov or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit which is due to be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Azerbaijan and other former Soviet republics. A senior aide to Putin suggested late last week that the Armenia premier will take part in the meeting via video link.
Another Russian official, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin, said on Monday that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hopes to hold trilateral talks with his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts in Bishkek on Thursday.
However, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said later in the day that Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan will not join a meeting of the top diplomats of CIS countries which will also take place in the Kyrgyz capital. Armenia will be represented at the meeting by one of Mirzoyan’s deputies, it told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
In what may have been a related development, Galuzin met with the Armenian ambassador in Moscow, Vagharshak Harutiunian, on Tuesday. The Russian Foreign Ministry said vaguely that they discussed “some topical issues of Russian-Armenian relations.”
Those relations deteriorated further last month following what Moscow described as “a series of unfriendly steps” taken by Yerevan. The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Pashinian on September 25 of seeking to ruin Russian-Armenian relations and reorient his country towards the West. Also, Putin and other Russian officials rejected the Armenian criticism of Russian peacekeepers’ failure to prevent or stop Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh that led to the mass exodus of the region’s ethnic Armenian population.