Thursday, Armenia To Get Another Russian Loan For Arms Imports . Hovannes Movsisian Russia -- A Russian TOS-1A multiple rocket launcher fires during the opening of the Army-2015 international military forum in Kubinka, outside Moscow, June 16, 2015 Russia will provide Armenia with a fresh $100 million loan that will be spent on the purchase of more Russian weapons for the Armenian military, it was announced on Thursday. The Armenian government formally approved a relevant draft loan agreement with Moscow at a weekly meeting chaired by Prime Minister Karen Karapetian. The upcoming agreement posted on the government's website says the funding is aimed at "further developing and reinforcing friendly relations" between the two states. It stipulates that the Russian loan will carry an annual interest rate of 3 percent and be repayable in 20 years, with a 5-year grace period. The government did not publicize an annex to the deal that lists the types of Russian-made military hardware which the Armenian side will be able to buy with the loan. Two years ago, the Russian government already lent Yerevan $200 million for arms acquisitions from Russian manufacturers. It subsequently publicized a long list of weapons covered by the deal. Those included, among other things, Smerch multiple-launch rocket system, TOS-1A thermobaric rockets, anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Armenia - The Armenian army demonstrates Buk air-defense systems recently acquired from Russia as well as S-300 surface-to-air missiles during a parade in Yerevan, 21Sep2016. The Armenian military demonstrated Smerch systems as well as several other new weapons at a September 2016 parade in Yerevan. Defense Minister Vigen Sargsian announced on October 2 that the arms supplies financed from the $200 million loan will be completed by the end of this year. Other officials in Yerevan said earlier that 18 supply contracts were signed with the Russians as part of the 2015 deal. Armenia buys Russian weapons at internal Russian prices that are set well below international market-based levels. The South Caucasus country is entitled to such discounts because of its bilateral military alliance with Russia and membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-led security bloc comprising six ex-Soviet republics. Yerevan announced the impending release of the $100 million loan one week after the Armenian parliament ratified a Russia-Armenian agreement on a joint military force based in Armenia. Under that accord signed late last year, "the united group of troops" is tasked with "ensuring military security in the region." The close military ties with Yerevan have not stopped Moscow from selling billions of dollars worth of heavy weapons to Azerbaijan in the past several years. Russian arms sales to Baku continued even after unusually strong criticism voiced by Armenian leaders following the April 2016 fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh. In July this year, President Serzh Sarkisian reiterated Yerevan's discontent with the Russian-Azerbaijani arms dealings while seemingly downplaying their impact on the military balance in the Karabakh conflict. Armenian Official Downbeat On Karabakh Peace . Sargis Harutyunyan Russia - Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (R) looks on as his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisian speaks at a Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Sochi, 11Oct2017. A senior Armenian diplomat sounded pessimistic on Thursday about prospects for the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict ahead of a planned meeting of Armenia's and Azerbaijan's presidents. The U.S., Russian and French mediators said after their latest visits to Yerevan and Baku over the weekend that Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev agreed to resume their face-to-face peace talks soon. The three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group said they discussed with them "possible topics" that will be on the agenda of the "forthcoming summit." Aliyev and Sarkisian did not meet on the sidelines of a summit of ex-Soviet states held in the Russian city of Sochi on Wednesday. It remains unclear when and where their encounter will take place. The mediators hope that it will help to revive the Karabakh peace process. "We must always differentiate between two planes," said Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharian. "One of them is about forming an atmosphere of trust, without which progress in the negotiation process is impossible, and the other about making progress in the negotiation process itself." "It is evident that right now there are no grounds, no positive trends that would allow us to speak of progress in the negotiation progress," he told reporters. Kocharian pointed to Baku's reluctance to comply with confidence-building agreements that were reached by Aliyev and Sarkisian at their last meetings held more than a year ago. Those called for the deployment of more OSCE observers in the conflict zone and international investigations of truce violations occurring there. Armenian leaders have repeatedly said that the peace process cannot move forward without these confidence-building measures. Speaking in Baku on Monday, Aliyev claimed that Yerevan has been forced to give up its "preconditions" for resuming substantive negotiations on a Karabakh settlement. Sarkisian angrily denied that claim through a spokesman the following day. His press secretary, Vladimir Hakobian, accused Aliyev of "trying to deceive the international community and his own people." Government Bill To Limit Power Of Armenia's Next Commander-In-Chief . Ruzanna Stepanian Armenia - President Serzh Sarkisian and Prime Minister Karen Karapetian arrive for a cabinet meeting in Yerevan, 29Jun2017. Armenia's prime minister will likely have less authority over the armed forces than the president of the republic currently has after the country becomes a parliamentary republic next April. The existing Armenian constitution gives the president sweeping powers, including the right to introduce martial law, call a general mobilization and ask the parliament to declare war. A government bill circulated last month would transfer these powers to the cabinet, rather than the prime minister personally, even though the latter will become the Armenian army's commander-in-chief after the parliamentary system of government takes effect in April 2018. The draft Law on Defense would also introduce a more complex chain of command. The Armenian military would be controlled by the government and the defense minister in particular. At the same time its top brass would be directly subordinate to the chief of the army's General Staff. The latter will in turn report to the defense minister in times of peace and to the prime minister during a war. Tevan Poghosian, the director of the Yerevan-based International Center for Human Development (ICHD), agreed that the proposed law calls for a more collective leadership of the army. He welcomed this change. "There is going to be more teamwork in decision making, this is what the parliamentary model is all about," Poghosian told RFE/RL's Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). "We have always fought for ensuring that all the levers [of power] are not in the president's hands," added the former opposition parliamentarian. But Poghosian also cautioned: "The answer to the question of whether or not a lot will change in our reality after April also depends on who will # hold that post [of prime minister.]" President Serzh Sarkisian has still not publicly clarified what he plans to do after completing his second and final presidential term in April. He said vaguely in March that he would like to "play a role, in some capacity, in ensuring the security of our people." For his part, Prime Minister Karen Karapetian has repeatedly indicated his desire to retain his post. Some observers have suggested that Sarkisian is planning to stay in power in a different, more unofficial capacity. The president is also the top leader of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia, which enjoys a solid majority in the parliament. Armenian Top Brass Lectured On Russian Operations In Syria . Emil Danielyan Armenia - Colonel-General Aleksandr Dvornikov (R), the commander of Russia's Southern Military District, speaks at the Armenian Defense Ministry in Yerevan, 12Oct2017. The former commander of Russian troops in Syria on Thursday briefed Armenia's Defense Minister Vigen Sargsian and top army generals on Russian military operations conducted in the war-torn nation. The Armenian Defense Ministry said Colonel-General Aleksandr Dvornikov gave the "lecture" at its headquarters in Yerevan. Photographs released by the ministry showed that the chief of the Armenian army's General Staff, Colonel-General Movses Hakobian, and at least two of his deputies were among several dozen military officials attending the event. A ministry statement said Dvornikov, who now heads Russia's Southern Military District, spoke about Russian tactics of fighting against the so-called Islamic State militant group in Syria and "specificities of modern warfare." The statement added that the lecture was organized "within the framework" of joint military exercises taking place at a training center about 50 kilometers west of Yerevan. More than 2,500 soldiers of the Armenian army, the Russian military base in Armenia and a rapid-reaction force set up by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) are taking part in the five-day drills that began on Monday. The Russian base is part of the Southern Military District. It was not clear whether Dvornikov discussed the possibility of Armenian involvement in Russian operations in Syria. Another top Russian military official said in August that Armenia and Serbia have expressed readiness to join a multinational "coalition" which Russia hopes would help its troops clear landmines there. Moscow formally proposed its creation at the United Nations in April. The Armenian Defense Ministry said on September 11 that it is ready in principle to send sappers to "those parts of Syria where there are no ongoing hostilities." But it stressed that their deployment must follow "all international legal procedures." Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 20, President Serzh Sarkisian clarified that such a mission would have to have a UN mandate. Press Review "Zhamanak" reports that President Serzh Sarkisian raised "a number of concrete issues important to Armenia" at Wednesday's summit in Sochi of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). The paper finds "interesting" the fact that this happened shortly after the Armenian parliament debated opposition calls for the country's exit from the Russian-led trade bloc. It wonders whether Sarkisian used the opposition Yelk's initiative to "get more aggressive vis-á-vis other EEU members" or on the contrary to "demonstrate that he is in full control of the situation and able to manage developments." An Iranian analyst, Kayhan Barzegar, tells "168 Zham" that Prime Minister Karen Karapetian did not discuss new issues with Iranian leaders during his official visit to Tehran this week. He says that "the most serious" Armenian-Iranian projects remain the planned expansion of an electricity-for-gas swap arrangement, the creation of a free economic zone on Armenia's border with Iran and the increase in cargo traffic between the two countries. "After the lifting of sanctions [against Iran] the political and economic agenda of Armenian-Iranian relations has expanded," he says. "But even this does not correspond to the full potential of those relations because Iran has not gotten rid of the sanctions for good. What is more, the new U.S. president is threatening Iran with new sanctions." "Zhoghovurd" condemns the "thuggish" behavior of members of the ruling Republican Party (HHK) who continued to insult their opposition colleagues during Wednesday's session of Yerevan's municipal council. "Civilized debate is not something that suits the Republicans," writes the paper. "They are more familiar with insults and swear words simply because the Republicans do not understand a different language." "Offensive statements made during the debate are unacceptable to me," Vahram Baghdasarian, the leader of the HHK faction in the Armenian parliament, is quoted by "Haykakan Zhamanak" as saying. The paper is unimpressed by this reaction to what happened in the Yerevan assembly. It says Baghdasarian also complained on Wednesday that media outlets ignore controversial statements made by opposition politicians and activists. (Tigran Avetisian) Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL Copyright (c) 2017 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc. 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org