Russia’s top diplomat has blamed the war in Ukraine for affecting the supply of arms to Armenia, and has expressed concern that Moscow’s longstanding ally would now look to the West for military support instead.
Speaking in Yerevan on the second day of a two-day visit to Armenia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that some of Russia’s weapons contracts with the former Soviet republic had been delayed or reassigned due to the pressures created by the war in Ukraine.
Armenia has long relied on Russian weapons in its bitter dispute with neighbouring Azerbaijan, against whom it has fought a series of conflicts since the late 1980s.
“We are currently in a situation where, as has happened throughout history, we are forced to fight all of Europe,” Lavrov said, in a barbed reference to European support for Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.
“Our Armenian friends understand that in such conditions, we cannot fulfil all our obligations on time.”
As Russia has failed to deliver on weapons contracts paid for by Armenia, Yerevan has increasingly turned to countries like France and India for military supplies.
Lavrov said that Russia would not oppose these growing ties, but said that they raised concerns about its traditional ally’s strategic intentions.
“When an ally turns to a country like France, which leads the hostile camp and whose president and ministers speak openly with hatred toward Russia, it does raise questions,” he said.
Armenia has strengthened its ties with the West amid recent ongoing tensions with Azerbaijan, fallout from the last major eruption of conflict and Russia’s role in that.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military operation to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist enclave in Azerbaijan with a mostly ethnic Armenian population that had broken away from Baku with Armenian support amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Armenia accused Russian peacekeepers of failing to protect the more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians who fled the region, fuelled by decades of distrust, wars, mutual hatred and violence, after Azerbaijan’s lightning takeover.
Yerevan also suspended its involvement in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a Russian-led security umbrella of ex-Soviet countries, last year, saying it would not participate or fund the alliance.
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