
Zatulin: The West doesn’t care about Armenia’s future
In an interview with Gazeta.Ru, Konstantin Zatulin, First Deputy Chairman of the Committee of the State Duma for the CIS and Relations with Russian Nationals Abroad, said that the Armenian leadership’s shift toward the West has been under way for quite some time but has become particularly noticeable in the last year or two.
“The current Armenian government justifies its pivot toward the West by its defeat in the 2020 Karabakh war. Pashinyan blames the Russian leadership for not providing adequate support to Yerevan at that time, which ultimately led to Armenia losing Karabakh completely. In fact, this rhetoric shifts the responsibility from the prime minister to a third party,” Zatulin said.
He noted that “Armenia is not the only country in the South Caucasus that has been offered to sign such a document.” Previously, the same agreement existed between the U.S. and Georgia until Washington canceled it due to dissatisfaction with the Georgian authorities. Zatulin recalled that a similar situation had occurred in the bilateral relations between Russia and Armenia after World War I, when the Ottoman and Russian empires collapsed. “The Armenian authorities were very eager to gain independence and, for that purpose, appealed to the Entente countries and the U.S. for defense. However, even then, there was no assistance,” Zatulin remarked.