UNLEASHING NEW WAR FOR KARABAKH TO FULLY DISCREDIT RUSSIA’S POLICY IN SOUTH CAUCASUS: RUSSIAN EXPERT

ArmInfo
2009-01-20 17:18:00

ArmInfo.Unleashing new war for Karabakh will fully discredit Russia’s
policy in the South Caucasus, Aleksey Yegorov, an expert of the
Russian Strategic Culture Foundation, told ArmInfo.

‘Certain forces interested in weakening of Russia’s influence on the
region keep on developing null scenarios. This time they started
saying allegedly in 2008 Moscow transferred weapons and military
hardware to Yerevan worth 800 million dollars without compensation’,
the expert said. Azerbaijani news agencies provided the list of a
great variety of weapons and military hardware (mostly outdated)
allegedly transferred to Yerevan to surprise uninformed Internet users.

The expert mentioned the statements by Colonel Alexander Drobishevsky,
Acting Head of the Russian Defense Ministry Department for Information
and Press that no weapons were delivered to Armenia and the reports
by Azerbaijani media do not correspond reality. ‘We evaluate such
reports as provocation’, Drobishevsky declared. He also underlined
that Colonel Aleksander Petrunin, who was mentioned as a prior source
of the above reports by the Azerbaijani ANS, is not competent to give
such comments to anyone. For his part, Press Secretary of Armenian
Defense Ministry Seyran Shakhsouvaryan refuted the reports as well.

The expert is sure that such methods to involve oversea forces in the
conflicts they had provoked aim to break Russia’s efforts to maintain
peace in the region’, Yegorov says.