Masterminds behind separatist Khankandi rally fail to reach goals
Armenian residents of Karabakh part of experiment

ANALYTICS  02 November 2022 - 14:50

The day before [Armenian Prime Minister] Nikol Pashinyan's diplomatic performance reaching public humiliation in Sochi, a rather large rally for provincial scales in support of the Artsakh project, which is on the verge of collapse, was held in the city of Khankandi.

The entire administrative arsenal was used to organise this action, which drew approximately 15,000 people. Furthermore, five parties appeared to be interested in organising this rally at the same time, namely: the illegal Karabakh regime in the person of Araik Harutyunyan, fearful of the prospect of voluntary and forced reintegration; the Armenian authorities, driven into a dead end, tried to get at least one trump card in favour of Karabakh's "subjectivity" on the eve of the Sochi meeting; the Russian peacekeeping contingent, risking being left without a profitable job and turning out to be a friendly 2,000-strong team in the stinking corpse-like vast expanses of Ukraine, deadly for Russians; the Kremlin, unwilling, due to the inertia of its own imperial policy, to let out of the hands of a rusty, and thus largely lost the functionality of the lever of influence on the South Caucasus; the octopus of the Armenian diaspora in Russia, which, following Kocharyan's "miscarriage," is growing another political homunculus in the Karabakh political incubator - Ruben Vardanyan - with the goal of transferring him to replace the "traitor" Nikol Pashinyan in Yerevan.

As a result, the stars in the Karabakh firmament converged for a brief moment, and on October 30, a rally was held in Karabakh thanks to the combined efforts of all parties.  A significant part of illegal Armenian military formations were driven to the rally (at the same time, the entire so-called "defence army" has about 10,000 people). Also, local "policemen", "rescuers" and other paramilitary pseudo-structures were promptly involved in the "nationwide demonstration", and literally all "state employees" and their families received orders from the civil sector. Moreover, Azerbaijan recorded that on October 30, 27 passenger buses with additional participants for rural extras were sent from Armenia to participate in the action. Also, according to our sources on the ground, Russian servicemen disguised in civilian clothes were involved in the action – apparently, the leadership of the Russian peacekeeping contingent decided to be more Armenians than the Armenians themselves at such a fateful moment for its future.

However, any mass celebrations, even rural ones, are not cheap. According to our sources, the rally's main financial sponsor was Armenian-Russian oligarch Ruben Vardanyan, who has recently become the main protege of the Russia-based Armenian ethnic mafia and the Kremlin structures associated with it. Vardanyan will soon take the post of the so-called "state minister" of the remnants of the separatist entity, displacing Artak Beglaryan, who is not remembered in history except for the second disability group. Political support for this action from Russia was punched by the current junta leader, Araik Harutyunyan, who recently met in Moscow with the Russian special services' representatives.

As you know, large rallies in the Russian peacekeeping contingent's area of responsibility do not take place without the permission of a well-known lover of Pirlar [village in Azerbaijan's Khojaly district under peacekeepers' control] grapes and vineyards who is embroiled in Armenian corruption schemes. We're talking about a character familiar to Azerbaijanis: Major General Andrei Volkov, commander of the Russian contingent. According to Arman Babajanyan, the leader of the For the Sake of the Republic party, it was Volkov who initiated and commissioned the rally, according to whom, if Armenia refuses the "Russian version" of the settlement, the peacekeeping mission will leave Karabakh.

Indeed, the Russians' departure from Karabakh is unfavourable not only for Kremlin policy but also for the Russian military, which has remained in their positions, overgrown with promising connections that feed them from the Armenian "trough". According to the data available to us, for his services in ensuring the rally's safe conduct, as well as for the promised "feasible support" of Ruben Vardanyan's future initiatives, the Russian general received the real estate in one of the major Russian cities as a gift from the Armenian-Russian oligarch, and family members of a high-ranking military man were promised support in finding promising and highly paid jobs, positions in the private sector.

It should be admitted that the Armenian community is working very effectively at the tactical level, and we have a lot to learn from our neighbours in this sphere. To buy and recruit volkovs, zatulins, solovyovs – they do well. However, the Armenian society, as in 1915, and at the end of the 1980s, is again being let down by the lack of strategic thinking and the inability to assess the situation soberly. Today, as in the past, the nationalist fervour of the Armenian nation is being used to achieve the goals of external actors and hardened ideological nationalists to the detriment of the broad masses of the people. And now, when the tense situation in the world and the region should be pushing Armenia towards peace with Azerbaijan and Türkiye, the diaspora imbued with the ideology of neo-Nazism, as well as internal radical forces, are once again pushing ordinary people, who are the product of the radical ideology prevailing in Armenia and the Diaspora, under the rails of the rushing train of geopolitical changes. And the main question today is whether the state, historically created in the region to serve the interests of third countries, will be able to reprogramme its defective primary source.

Nikol Pashinyan pretended in Sochi that he really tried, and he failed. The dry residue of the trilateral meeting in Sochi boils down to the fact that Karabakh was not mentioned in the text of the adopted joint statement, unlike the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty of states, mutual recognition of international borders in accordance with the UN Charter and the 1991 Almaty Declaration. According to Pashinyan's informal speaker, Ambassador-at-Large Edmond Marukyan, the Armenian prime minister tried to push the wording "Nagorno-Karabakh" during negotiations with Aliyev and Putin, but the Azerbaijani president did not agree with this. Pashinyan failed to include other items corresponding to the Armenian agenda – the withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops and the return of Armenian detainees (in fact, saboteurs). As a result, Pashinyan signed only what Aliyev agreed to.

Thus, the rally in Khankandi failed to influence the course of the Sochi negotiations and somehow denote the "subjectivity of Karabakh". Pashinyan could not capitalise on this action or did not want to. And even Russia, which is also interested in keeping the Karabakh issue in the "air", could not compensate for the Armenian prime minister's failure. Accordingly, the Kremlin circles focused on the instrumentalisation of Armenian nationalism, which is behind the Ruben Vardanyan project, but did not achieve their goal this time.

Moreover, by adopting the Sochi statement, Nikol Pashinyan confirmed the recognition of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity not only on the Western but also on the Russian negotiating track. Meanwhile, diplomatic sources told Caliber.Az that Baku does not have to choose between the "Washington" or "Russian" versions of the peace treaty. There are five well-known basic principles proposed by Azerbaijan and implying unconditional recognition by Armenia of Azerbaijan's sovereignty over Karabakh, and they will form the basis of any peace treaty. Who exactly will moderate the process is of secondary importance for Baku, even if Mozambique acts as a moderator. Yerevan still mistakenly believed that the "right" choice of a mediator could allow it to continue the policy of territorial claims and refusal to fulfil painful agreements for Armenia.

And yet, the question remains open – why did Pashinyan sign such a statement, at first glance, unprofitable for Armenia? The entire Armenian expert community rack their brains over this, both the current government's supporters and opponents. The answer, in our opinion, should be sought in the hopelessly intimidating expression of Nikol Pashinyan's face - perhaps he is one of the few Armenian politicians who realised through terrible mistakes that Karabakh could become the grave of the entire Armenian statehood if the confrontation with Azerbaijan continues. There is another version – that Pashinyan was helped to understand this truth because it is not for nothing that the EU Special representative for the South Caucasus Toivo Klaar came to Nikol Pashinyan unplanned on the eve of his visit to Russia.

And what about the Armenian residents of Khankandi, who came out en masse to demonstrate against a de facto return to Azerbaijan's jurisdiction? They, who do not understand the inevitability of the ongoing processes, increasingly resemble the inhabitants of the nameless city created in the artificial world from the novel by the [Soviet-Russian science-fiction authors, Arkady and Boris] Strugatsky brothers "The Doomed City". In it, all the inhabitants are part of an experiment about which no one knows anything – and this ignorance is a condition of the experiment itself. An unnamed city in which – in our case – a cruel society is being built by an eternally blissful seal-like war criminal, a corrupt Russian general, an oligarch who escaped from sanctions, a blind cripple, a bearded radical with a claim to a diplomat and other comical characters. In the Strugatsky novel, a shot at his own reflection in the mirror takes the main character from a mythical city to ordinary reality – to his room in a Leningrad apartment in 1951. Will the shots bring our characters from Khankandi back to reality?

Caliber.Az