Global Courant
Moscow and Washington have accused each other of destabilizing the South Caucasus region, as thousands of ethnic Armenians fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh amid fears of ethnic cleansing.
“We urge Washington to refrain from extremely dangerous words and actions that lead to an artificial increase in anti-Russian sentiment in Armenia,” Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday .
Antonov’s comments follow the US State Department spokesman saying on Monday that Russia had shown it was not a reliable partner after Armenia blamed Moscow for failing to intervene in last week’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh Azerbaijani Armed Forces.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia has relied on a security partnership with Russia, but relations between the two countries have deteriorated severely since President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“I think Russia has shown that it is not a security partner that can be relied on,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
Thousands of ethnic Armenians fled the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh on Monday after their fighters were defeated by Azerbaijan in last week’s lightning military operation.
Baku has pledged to protect the rights of the roughly 120,000 Armenians who call Karabakh home, but many refuse to accept its promises. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan accused Russia of failing to guarantee Armenian security.
Washington and some of its Western allies condemned hostilities in Azerbaijan, which have changed the contours of the South Caucasus – a patchwork of ethnic groups crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the United States, Turkey and Iran compete for influence.
Moscow has said Armenia had only itself to blame for Azerbaijan’s victory over Karabakh, flirting with the West instead of working with Moscow and Baku for peace.
On Monday, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, and the US State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Yuri, arrived in Armenia, in the first visit by senior US officials since the Karabakh Armenians were forced into a ceasefire last year. week.
From 1988 to 1994, about 30,000 people were killed and well over a million people, mostly ethnic Azeris, displaced as the Armenians overthrew nominal Azerbaijani control in what is now known as the First Karabakh War.
Azerbaijan reclaimed territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh during a second war in 2020, which ended with a Moscow-brokered peace deal and the deployment of a contingent of Russian peacekeepers.
Turkey, which backed Azerbaijan with weapons in the 2020 conflict, said last week it supported the objectives of Azerbaijan’s latest military operation but had no role in it. REUTERS
