Taras Kuzio, a British-born political scientist of Ukrainian origin, who has repeatedly stood out for his anti-Armenian and Azerbaijani statements, published another article in Euronews, putting forward the theses of Azerbaijani propaganda about Ruben Vardanyan, the former state minister of Artsakh, a businessman, now imprisoned in Azerbaijan.
The author drew parallels between Ruben Vardanyan and Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor. “Both men are post-Soviet oligarchs who made their billions through Kremlin ties. Both are, by varying degrees, under restrictions or sanctions imposed by the western governments or their allies. And both were dispatched by Moscow to ferment unrest and then take power in Armenia and Moldova respectively, to maintain Russia’s influence in Euroasia by any means necessary,” Kuzio wrote.
In accordance with the Azerbaijani discourse, he called Artsakh “an illegal ethnic Armenian squatter state lying within the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan,” where Vardanyan was parachuted in by Moscow to remove Armenia’s pro-European Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Kuzio describes the torture of Vardanyan in Azerbaijani prison as “fake news” and a “PR move.”
According to the author, Vardanyan has been accused of money-laundering on an epic scale, washing $4.6bn.
Kuzio himself admits that the article he wrote is not unbiased, to put it mildly. “I cannot be independent about this man: As a proud Ukrainian patriot born in Britain, I could not be as he is a Kremlin agent who supports a genocidal war intent on destroying Ukraine and Ukrainian identity,” he writes.
In the end, the author advised the EU and its partners “not to believe the hype of expensive PR companies, whose job it is to deflect and hide the truth about them.”
