BAKU, Azerbaijan, Oct. 17
Trend:
The impartiality of the members of the OSCE Minsk Group in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and of international players, in general, is of great importance, Alexey Fenenko, Associate Professor at the Department of International Security, Faculty of World Politics, Lomonosov Moscow State University told Russian Vestnik Kavkaza, Trend reports.
“When there is a feeling that Paris or Washington will defend Armenia, it seems that an offensive can be carried out. I don’t think that Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan, denouncing the St. Petersburg and Vienna agreements of 2016 or conducting shelling of Azerbaijani villages on September 1, wanted the war that he eventually received. Rather, he believed that he would get away with it again, as usual, that the condemnation of his actions by Azerbaijan and Turkey didn’t matter much, because his friends from Washington and Paris would stand up to his defense. That is, the expectation of bias just contributed to the conflict behavior of Yerevan,” Fenenko said.
“Despite the official statements, Paris is unlikely to completely refuse to support the Armenian side in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is not worth predicting that now France will change its position from pro-Armenian to completely neutral, since the colossal and very influential Armenian lobby, which owns Emmanuel Macron, hasn’t gone anywhere. The Ministry of Culture of France even has quotas, according to which the Armenians in a certain number must be selected as employees. Therefore, France is only voicing the rhetoric required of it,” the professor said.
“The rhetoric in Paris was changed because, in my opinion, they were given to understand that they could be removed from the settlement process. When, sooner or later, peace and negotiations are restored, most likely, the OSCE Minsk Group will need to be reformatted, in which Russia and the US will most likely remain, and France will be in big question. Now it is enough to pay attention to the recent dialogue between Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, we’re talking about the greater activity of Turkey in the OSCE MG. By whom can Turkey be raised to the level of a co-chair country? It may well be that at the expense of France. Therefore, the French want to demonstrate neutrality to Azerbaijan in order to remain in the top three mediators,” Fenenko stressed.