Yerevan’s double-dealing policy When silence is not golden

In the French Senate, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot once again spoke about Karabakh on May 6, using the term “Nagorno-Karabakh” in reference to this region of the Republic of Azerbaijan — a term that has been consigned to the dustbin of history and permanently erased from Azerbaijan’s administrative-territorial division. In his lament-like monologue, the French minister expressed regret over the dismantling of structures remaining from the thirty-year occupation and called for the dispatch of an assessment mission from UNESCO — as if Baku had not itself been proposing such missions for decades, and as if it had not been Paris and Yerevan that once blocked these initiatives.

Meanwhile, earlier on April 30, the European Parliament adopted a resolution “On supporting democratic resilience in Armenia” — a “document” in which that country is presented as an object of European concern, while Azerbaijan appears in its familiar role as a source of threats.

In response, the Milli Majlis suspended cooperation with the European Parliament, and the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the EU ambassador. Overall, Baku has once again received confirmation that the peace process in the South Caucasus is, for some in Brussels and Paris, a bone in the throat.

These two episodes are links in the same chain, and this chain has been stretching for a long time. Since it became clear that Azerbaijan and Armenia were moving towards normalisation and that the Karabakh issue had been conclusively resolved, the peace agenda has acquired a steady group of detractors outside the region. Resolutions, statements, parliamentary hearings, calls for sanctions. There is little point in being surprised by this anymore: external actors are doing what they consider useful for the lobbies that sponsor them.

What is more striking is something else. On each such occasion, only one of the two sides provides a clear response — Azerbaijan. The country’s Foreign Ministry issues statements, its parliament adopts decisions, and the president, in interviews or at various summits, calls things by their proper names. It creates the impression that sustainable peace and security in the region are needed exclusively by Baku, while Yerevan appears in this narrative in the role of a spectator.

If the peace agenda is truly common, then this logic requires a proportionate response. The statement by the French minister, which challenges Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and thereby calls into question the very architecture of normalisation, should have prompted a reaction in Yerevan as well. The European Parliament’s resolution, in which Armenia is portrayed as a victim in need of protection from a neighbour that is proposing peace, is a document that undermines trust in the process. And if Yerevan is indeed intent on reaching a comprehensive agreement, then the Armenian Foreign Ministry should have stated exactly what Baku has been saying: that such texts hinder the parties on the path towards genuine peace. However, no such wording has come from Armenia.

Yet silence is only the first layer. The second consists of concrete “institutions”. In Armenia, structures linked to separatist remnants that refuse to recognise the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan continue to operate. They hold events, issue statements, appeal to foreign parliaments, and travel abroad — and during these visits they freely appear at platforms that are directly directed against Azerbaijan’s sovereignty, with which official Yerevan is conducting peace negotiations. The Armenian leadership does not curb or restrict this activity. Foreign trips take place using Armenian passports, through Yerevan airport, with the full acquiescence of the Armenian authorities.

Armenia’s logic is simple and rather cynical: Azerbaijan must recognise the territorial integrity of Armenia, while the so-called Karabakh Armenians in Armenia are allowed to continue doing whatever they wish with regard to Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. It is a kind of double-entry bookkeeping, in which one obligation is state-level and formal, while the other is societal-diaspora and informal — with the formal track expected to function without interfering with the informal one.

In his speeches in recent years, Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly stated that Armenia has no territorial claims against Azerbaijan. A state that has genuinely renounced territorial claims does not merely adjust its rhetoric — it confirms this through concrete actions. Declaring “we recognise the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan” while simultaneously maintaining in Yerevan pseudo-institutions linked to separatists, which send representatives to defend the so-called “Artsakh statehood” in European capitals, is precisely what defines a double-dealing policy.

This is also confirmed by the structure of external resolutions. The text of the European Parliament resolution of April 30 was not written in a vacuum — it had its consultants, sources, and intended audiences. When the European Parliament document portrays Armenia as a party in need of protection from a neighbour with which it is conducting peace negotiations, it reflects how Armenia itself positions itself in Brussels and Strasbourg.

No one at parliamentary hearings steps up to the microphone and says: “We are negotiating, we are moving towards a treaty, do not interfere.” If such a voice were present, the resolutions would look different. But they look the way they do because this text suits Yerevan. The external chorus performs the line that the internal conductor tacitly approves.

In the short term, such a scheme may appear rational to Yerevan. It preserves an internal balance between the part of Armenian society that wants peace and a normal life, and the part that still lives within a revanchist mythology. It maintains ties with the diaspora, for whom the Karabakh narrative remains central. It leaves room for bargaining over concessions: formal peace in one pocket, factual support for revanchism in the other, both stitched onto the same jacket. From the perspective of short-term political arithmetic, it is convenient.

From the perspective of the peace process, it is destructive. A peace process in which one side fulfils its obligations while the other simultaneously encourages those who undermine them leads nowhere. A signature on paper means little if one of the signatories operates on a fundamentally different level of responsibility for the consequences.

And the issue here is neither rhetorical nor moral. It is practical. If Armenia is genuinely oriented towards a peace agenda, it has a very simple and visible way to demonstrate it: to take a public position on statements by external actors that undermine this agenda, and to shut down the platforms within its own territory from which the sovereignty of its neighbour is being challenged. Nothing extraordinary — precisely what any state for which peace with its neighbour is a real priority, rather than a bargaining tool, would do in its place.

As long as this does not happen, the peace process remains a solo project of Azerbaijan. And every new statement by Barrot, every new European Parliament resolution, every visit by these remnants to European capitals serves only as a reminder that this project has no co-author. It has a single author, and an empty chair opposite it, in which someone must eventually take a principled position.