A spokeswoman for Armen Grigorian gave no reason for the decision to skip the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) meeting in Moscow when she communicated it to the official Armenpress news agency. RFE/RL’s Armenian Service could not contact her for further comment in the following hours.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian similarly declined to attend a CIS summit in Kyrgyzstan held on October 13. The effective boycott highlighted his government’s mounting tensions with Moscow.
Grigorian added to those tensions when he joined security officials from more than 60 countries who gathered in Malta late last month to discuss Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s plan to end the war with Russia. He also met with Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, during what Moscow condemned as a “blatantly anti-Russian event.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry called Grigorian’s trip to Malta a “demonstrative anti-Russian gesture of official Yerevan” and accused Pashinian’s administration of systematically “destroying” Russian-Armenian relations. Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonian rejected the criticism last Friday, saying that Russia is keen to maintain Armenia’s “existential dependence” on it.
Earlier this year, Yerevan also refused to participate in military exercises held by the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and shunned a meeting of the defense ministers of ex-Soviet states making up the Russian-led alliance.
Pashinian has repeatedly accused the CSTO and Russia of not honoring their security commitments to Armenia. But he has so far stopped short of pulling his country out of the alliance or demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.