As thousands of ethnic Armenians abandoned their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh due to ethnic cleansing fears, Moscow and Washington have accused each other of destabilizing the South Caucuses region.
“We urge Washington to refrain from extremely dangerous words and actions that lead to an artificial increase in anti-Russian sentiment in Armenia”, Russia’s Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, said on Tuesday via the Telegram messaging app.
Antonov’s remarks come after a US State Department spokesperson said on Monday that Russia had demonstrated it was not a trusted partner after Armenia accused Moscow of failing to intervene in Azerbaijani forces’ seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh last week.
Armenia has relied on a security alliance with Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but relations between the two nations have deteriorated significantly since President Vladimir Putin started an invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated, “I do think that Russia has shown that it is not a security partner that can be relied on”.
Thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh by Monday after Azerbaijan defeated their fighters in a quick military campaign last week.
Baku has committed to guaranteeing the rights of the approximately 120,000 Armenians who live in Karabakh, but many are skeptical. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan condemned Russia for failing to provide security for Armenians.
Washington and a number of its Western allies decried the Azeri hostilities, which have altered the outlines of the South Caucasus – a patchwork of ethnicities crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the US, Turkey, and Iran compete for influence.
Moscow has stated that Armenia was solely to blame for Azerbaijan’s triumph over Karabakh because it flirted with the West rather than working for peace with Moscow and Baku.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power and the United States State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Yuri arrived in Armenia on Monday, the first visit by senior US officials since the Karabakh Armenians were forced to agree to a ceasefire last week.
Between 1988 and 1994, around 30,000 people were killed and over a million people, predominantly ethnic Azeris, were displaced as Armenians seized nominal Azerbaijani control in what is now known as the First Karabakh War.
Azerbaijan reclaimed territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in a second war in 2020, which ended with a peace settlement negotiated by Moscow and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers.
Turkey, which provided equipment to Azerbaijan during the 2020 battle, stated last week that it supported the goals of Azerbaijan’s newest military action but played no role in it.
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