The Kremlin on Wednesday accused France of triggering instability in its former imperial hinterland after Paris agreed to sell its renowned Caesar artillery weapons to Armenia amid growing tensions with neighboring Azerbaijan.
“Paris is provoking another round of armed confrontation in the South Caucasus, and they are doing it in different ways. This [sale] is another step,” Russian media quoted Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova as saying.
Earlier this week, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said Armenia was interested in purchasing 36 Caesar self-propelled howitzers — a weapon made by KNDS France that is widely used in Ukraine.
Paris has in recent months ramped up military cooperation with Yerevan with contracts and training. Arms sales include Thales-made GM200 air surveillance radars, while talks are underway on contracts for MBDA-made Mistral missiles.
Earlier on Tuesday, Azerbaijan accused France of undermining the stability of the turbulent region, less than a year since Baku itself launched a military offensive against ethnic Armenian forces in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“France’s equipping of Armenia with lethal and offensive artillery installations and other types of weapons, despite the warning from the Azerbaijani side, is further evidence of France’s provocative activities in the South Caucasus,” said Azerbaijan’s defense ministry in a statement.
However, Armenia — and France — accuse Azerbaijan of trying to settle a decades-old conflict by force and of seeking to disrupt the conclusion of a peace agreement between the two former Soviet republics.
“Azerbaijan’s practice of predicting regional escalations at every opportunity is alarming,” Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The ministry added it “proves” Azerbaijan intends to avoid forging a peace deal with Armenia with an eye to launching new aggression after the COP29 U.N. climate change conference in Baku in November.
Russia has historically armed both Azerbaijan and Armenia, providing the weaponry used in a spate of wars between the two countries since the fall of the Soviet Union. A bitter conflict in the 1990s saw hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced from inside their own borders, and Armenian forces take control of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Since then, Azerbaijan has used its sizeable fossil-fuel revenues and its close alliance with NATO member Turkey to ensure its troops are better trained and better equipped than Armenia’s.
Last September, Azerbaijan launched an offensive to take back Nagorno-Karabakh, despite the presence of a Russian peacekeeping force that failed to intervene. The fighting triggered the exodus of the region’s 100,000 Armenian inhabitants. In September 2022, Azerbaijan launched incursions across the internationally recognized border, while the Russian-led CSTO military alliance ignored pleas from the Armenian government for support. Unlike Armenia, Azerbaijan is not a member of the mutual defense bloc.
“Azerbaijan is significantly better-armed than Armenia because of years of procurement from Turkey and Israel,” said Tigran Grigoryan, head of Yerevan’s Regional Center for Democracy and Security. “France’s approach is that providing weapons to Armenia makes another offensive more costly for Azerbaijan, and therefore makes war less likely — not more.”
Armenia has announced it intends to quit the CSTO and is working to strengthen ties with the West. A tranche of leaked documents seen by POLITICO reveal that Belarus, a member of the alliance, actively armed Azerbaijan before and after a 2020 war between the two neighbors, despite its obligation to help defend Armenia as part of the pact.Laura Kayali contributed reporting.
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