Armenian pundit: Pashinyan saw Russia as having lost in Ukraine and turned to the West

Armenian political scientist Suren Surenyants has said that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believed that Russia had lost in Ukraine and hence shifted to the West.

“As for changing the vector, first of all, we need to understand when Pashinyan’s political turn began. Many attribute this turn to the consequences of the September 2022 clashes, but this is not the case,” Surenyants said in an interview with Armenian media, Caliber.Az reports.

“The first attempt to change the course was made by Nikol Pashinyan at the beginning of April 2022. He assumed or considered that the retreat of Russian troops at the outskirts of Kharkiv and Kyiv meant the beginning of Russia's fiasco in the war in Ukraine and decided to change his policy. He believed that the war in Ukraine ended in the failure of Russia and it was necessary to establish new relations with the West, and so on. In essence, he decided to openly oppose Russia without external support.

Perhaps our society realized this later, but the Russian establishment immediately understood his intentions from his statements. After this, in October 2022, quadripartite statements were made in which Nikol Pashinyan, as the head of the Republic of Armenia, recognized Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.

We can be indignant, react emotionally and bring up thousands of arguments, but in this case, one of the two parties to the conflict, in this case, Armenia, officially recognized that the Karabakh conflict no longer exists. This is a very important point.

In other words, the Republic of Armenia, represented by its Prime Minister, announced the end of the conflict. This is a turning point not only for resolving the Karabakh problem, but also for the reorientation of the political system of Armenia as a whole,” the political scientist noted.