ArmInfo.Unlike the Tripartite Statement that ended the 44-day war, the peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan will most likely not be concluded under the auspices of the Russian Federation. A similar opinion was expressed to ArmInfo by chief researcher of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, orientalist Alexey Malashenko.
On April 6, the head of the Armenian government Nikol Pashinyan will visit Brussels, where he will meet with head of the European Council Charles Michel and Ilham Aliyev. It should be noted that on the eve of his visit, Pashinyan announced his intention to agree with Aliyev on the start of peace negotiations.
"In this light, I consider it important to emphasize that the EU peace initiatives in the Armenian-Azerbaijani vector of Western policy take place in parallel and in undoubted connection with the Ukrainian vector. And the undoubted absence of a causal link between them in this case plays absolutely no role in the eyes of the West. Moscow's reaction to what is happening is still incomprehensible. It can be said that the EU initiatives in the Caucasus do not meet with much opposition from Russia. The latter suggests that a change in the situation in the South Caucasus without the participation of Russia against the background of Ukraine is natural and even expected," he noticed.
At the same time, Malashenko considers obvious significant differences in the price of the expected peace for the participants in this process: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey, which, in his opinion, is of secondary importance for the main moderator of the peace process – the EU, at best. In the analyst's opinion, the main thing for Brussels is its own interest, the desire to gain a foothold in the South Caucasus, take control of some regional processes and, of course, achieve all this by weakening the presence and mediation of Moscow.
"And it is quite natural that, among other things, the EU is primarily trying to achieve this goal in the region through the promotion and signing of an agreement on peace between Yerevan and Baku. And this is against the background of the existence of two tripartite statements and a commission for their implementation with the participation of the Russian Federation. And I do not at all rule out the achievement of specific Pashinyan-Aliyev agreements in the Charles Michel format, which the OSCE Minsk Group will subsequently join in, as Armenia wishes," the Russian analyst summed up.