ARMINFO News Agency, Armenia
 Monday


 View from Moscow: In the base of Russia`s "arms policy" is the
military-political and economic component

Yerevan May 22

David Stepanyan. In the base of Russia's "weapons policy" is the
military- political and economic component. Commenting on the role of
parallel deliveries of arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan in Russia's
foreign policy, Military expert Vladimir Yevseyev Caucasus department
of the Institute of CIS countries deputy director told ArmInfo as.

"One of the reasons for last year's April war was a violation of the
balance of forces along the contact line. Moreover, both
quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, we are talking about
the systems of reactive volley fire "Smerch", "Soncepyok", a number of
other types of weapons allowed this balance change. Meanwhile, in the
event of timely implementation of Russia's plans to supply a parity
Armenia until April, the conditions for war, probably still would be
less. Now the balance is restored, if not quantitatively,
qualitatively. I do not know what kind of UAV has Armenia, maybe
Russia helped, but it is not so important, the main thing is that now
Armenia has weapons to respond", he said.

Therefore, for the Russian arms supplies to Azerbaijan, according to
military expert - is to hold Azerbaijan in the sphere of its
influence. At the same time, he does not believe that Russia sells
weapons to Baku for purely economic reasons, since for Russia it is
not the amount for which it would sacrifice allied relations with
Armenia. At the same time, Russia, he said, certainly would like to
see Azerbaijan in its sphere of influence. This is important both from
a military-political and economic point of view, if we consider the
implementation of the project of building an international transport
corridor "North-South" with the participation of Iran, Russia and
Azerbaijan. It is Azerbaijan that is the transit country of
Russian-Iranian cooperation. And the victory of Hasan Rouhani in the
presidential elections creates good prerequisites for the
implementation of this project.

"And the weapons Russia sell to Azerbaijan, most likely because of
those two factors, compensating it shipments of Armenia in order to
equalize the balance. Armenia is the ally of Russia, in Azerbaijan,
unlike Armenia, we do not have a single military Russian base,
therefore Armenia should not wary about arms supplies to Azerbaijan.
In the end, in April, Azerbaijan used Israeli and not Russian, against
Karabakh army. "Spike", UAVs, some other systems. Russia is not
interested in the destabilization of the situation around Karabakh,
knowing well that it threatens with a large regional war", summed
Yevseyev.