Moscow accuses the EU of fomenting ‘geopolitical confrontation’ with its mission in Armenia

On Thursday, Russia accused the EU of fomenting “geopolitical confrontation” by sending a civilian mission to guard the unstable border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, an area Russia considers its backyard.

Russia’s foreign ministry said the EU has become a “supporter of the United States and NATO and is pursuing a policy of confrontation in the post-Soviet space”. It ruled that a European mission in Armenia would “introduce a geopolitical confrontation in the region and exacerbate existing contradictions there”.

Moscow responded to a series of recent European initiatives on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, including the EU’s announcement on Monday of the establishment of a two-year civilian mission in Armenia to monitor the volatile border between the two rival former Soviet republics of the Caucasus.

Russia has been the traditional mediator in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the 1990s and has deployed a peacekeeping mission to Nagorny-Karabakh, an area fought over by Baku and Yerevan, after the 2020 war.

But Russian influence in the region has clearly waned, due to Western and Turkish geopolitical competition, but also due to the attack on Ukraine, which is worrying its neighbors.

For Moscow, the EU’s move “seeks to undermine Russia’s mediation efforts”.

European countries have been making their own attempts to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan for months. However, the mission that the EU will deploy has not received approval from the Azerbaijani side.

For its part, Armenia has denounced the inaction of Russia, whose peacekeeping mission the nation says has done nothing to prevent the continued blockade of Nagorny-Karabakh.

The US in turn lent its support to the European mediation mission.

“We welcome the efforts of our partners, including the European Union, to build trust in the region and create a climate conducive to direct dialogue between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” the spokesman told Foreign Ministry reporters. Affairs.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week urged Azerbaijan to lift the blockade of Nagorny-Karabakh.

For more than a month, Azerbaijanis posing as environmental activists demonstrating against illegal mines have blocked a vital road connecting Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist region of Azerbaijan populated by Armenians.

The blockade has left the area, which has a population of about 120,000, with power and internet outages, problems with heating and access to food and medicines.

“It is a policy of ethnic cleansing,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a government meeting on Thursday, accusing Azerbaijan of “using economic and psychological pressure to provoke an exodus of Armenians from Karabakh.”