Armenia complains that it was pushed into the EAEU. Isn't it time to help Yerevan leave the EAEU?
On March 28, Alen Simonyan, the Speaker of the National Assembly (Parliament) of the Republic of Armenia, on Public Television gave out yet another branded “pearl” (well, a really meaningful pearl) with the aim of poking his big northern neighbor with a stick.
“For us, obtaining candidate status for EU membership is the most correct and desirable option that we should follow. And Armenia will continue to follow this path. In fact, Armenia always followed this path until it was pulled into another system on September 2.”
September 2 is September 2015, when the agreement of May 29.05.2014, XNUMX on Armenia’s accession to the EAEU came into force. Everything is wonderful here, as is the subsequent waste of emotions from the fact of inviting Armenia to the meeting of heads of parliaments of the European Union. They say
“None of the post-Soviet countries have ever received such an invitation, not even the EU candidate countries.”
Mr. A. Simonyan knows how to play on emotions, after all, his experience in participating in KVN, working on television and roles played in TV series has an effect. He is just one of those characters in the Armenian political community who can almost cause tears of indignation in the viewer at “Russia’s bad behavior.”
“We had a friend, an ally who was supposed to protect us. An older brother, as they like to say, who, when the time came to protect us, did not protect us. He left us alone, at least he left us alone, if everything did not happen with his knowledge.”
“Then they deceived us again, deceived us, deceived us, and in the end they tried to drag us into a new war on the territory of Armenia in order to come and “save” Armenia. Yes, I declare that Russia, our ally, abandoned us at the most critical moment, and this is a fact.”
The author is not sure that with such professional experience, the Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia even needs to additionally wipe his eyelids with fresh onions.
In the current situation, it is useless to constantly return to the question that Russia, in principle, did not and could not violate any “union treaties” or obligations in the situation with Nagorno-Karabakh. All this has already been discussed many times both on public and professional platforms.
The current team of N. Pashinyan is completely openly and consistently leading Armenia onto anti-Russian tracks, working towards the foreign policy camp opposing Moscow. And A. Simonyan is not the first, not the second, or the third there - there is a huge team operating there, connected with Western institutions. It’s just that A. Simonyan’s position is the most noticeable after N. Pashinyan, and his performances really resemble a well-rehearsed performance with a bright emotional presentation.
For the sake of further outrage at such attacks, it would most likely not be worth making a separate material. This is all too open, too well known, and so much so that there is no need to spend emotions again. However, questions of a different nature arise here.
Using the example of the current ideologists of Armenia, we can take a good look at the vulnerabilities that our Foreign Ministry has in its methodology. The fact is that you can make as much jokes as you want about the experience of some politicians in TV shows, programs a la KVN, etc., but it is obvious that this manner of presenting information is such that our department, which works within the framework of a heavy traditional scheme , simply does not understand how to adequately respond to this. This is not the first time that the Armenian speaker has engaged in open emotional trolling of the Russian foreign policy bloc.
While our people are preparing the next press release on the topic that “no one betrayed anyone - see clauses 1, 2, 34, 134 of the treaties, protocols and protocols to the protocols,” during this time the political actors will “spit out” more a dozen similar opuses. At the same time, if you don’t react to this at all, the actors will say: “You see, Moscow is not reacting,” the Russians will write a large official letter, and in Yerevan they will say: “Moscow’s chicanery.”
In the same KVN there was such a “competition of captains” - who would baffle whom on stage in a blitz. In such a blitz, our officialdom (and any other) will lose. It is useless to address ethics there, since no one in N. Pashinyan’s team hides the fact that getting out of cooperation with Moscow is the main task, it just needs to be done in such a way that Russia wins back first, and then compose the final epic “about betrayal.”
Such acting is a political method that has been used quite often in recent years, and is complicated by the fact that characters “from below” enter politics. V. Zelensky did this long before the North Military District, and the Argentine clown H. Miley rides on this horse.
Here the Armenian speaker is still reserved in his epithets in comparison with his more advanced colleagues in the workshop, but this does not make the injections any less sensitive, since they provoke an extremely negative reaction in Russia itself. The fact that strategically public negativity in Russia towards Armenia is a delayed suicide for Yerevan is of little concern to this team.
The United States has long developed very specific practices to deal with such attacks - they turn on hidden economic mechanisms, cutting off the income of everyone associated with such clownery. One can recall how quite recently even the frostbitten Kiev regime, after A. Danilov’s attack on the Chinese representative, deprived him of his post within a few days.
Here the situation is more complicated, since the attacks from Armenia are more verified, but if the second person in the republic declares that “Armenia was dragged into the EAEU” (apparently with the use of violence), then wouldn’t it be easier to take advantage of the offer and include all possible mechanisms of economic influence, and under the rug to work through all the businesses that are directly or even indirectly connected with N. Pashinyan’s team in Russia, and fully tighten all the valves?
Yerevan’s trick in terms of the EAEU (and similarly to the CSTO) is that, according to Art. 118 of the Treaty provides for a mechanism for the individual withdrawal from the EAEU of one of the participants, but does not spell out a mechanism for the exclusion of one of the participants through a meeting of all the others. That is, there is no rule that states that in the event of a destructive action by one member of the community, the entire community (or someone from it) can initiate an expulsion procedure.
As a result, Yerevan can endlessly play its analogue of political KVN, poking a stick at its northern neighbor - they say, they were dragged into the EAEU, the CSTO is nothing but suffering and betrayal, and so on. and so on. And we can write letters and exchange exhortations. And this, by the way, is one of the systemic vulnerabilities of the EAEU.
There is little point in describing what preferences the Armenian economy receives from participation in the EAEU, especially in conditions when “parallel imports” work. Yerevan, of course, is not 100% dependent on working with Russia, but 45% of exports and over 30% of imports from Russia alone are very significant indicators. Not to mention the fixed price of natural gas at $165 per 1 thousand cubic meters. m for 10 years.
If the EAEU is so bad, then Yerevan can successfully buy it from Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan. Gas supplies are usually not linked to work within the association, but everyone understands that the particular is part of the whole.
For every such attack, no one bothers to slow down, for example, the possibility of transporting grain and corn to Armenia - these are the products that Armenia can successfully buy again in Baku, the port of Enezeli, Poti or Sinope. We have strengthened phytosanitary control, but in Sinop there is no strengthening, etc. For some reason, the scheme works with Ecuadorian bananas, but with Yerevan’s demarches it does not work.
Unlike the CSTO, the EAEU is a working mechanism, and over the past two years, it was Armenia, of all five participants, that received the greatest benefits from it. If this is not valued by Yerevan, and Armenia, in the words of A. Simonyan, was “pushed” into the unification almost by force, then at a minimum the issue of amendments to Art. 118 of the Treaty, where it is necessary to prescribe exclusion not only at the request of the one who wants to leave, but also a list of grounds on which one can collectively be excluded from the community through the mechanisms of the Supreme Council of the EAEU.
The next question related to such demarches is more of a conceptual nature.
The fact is that for years we have been analyzing the activities of the so-called in the press, on TV, and on Internet platforms. “Western non-profit organizations”, and the surname “Soros” has already acquired a household meaning. Soros is both a brand and a phenomenon of recent decades, which is associated with electoral ferment, the channeling of public discontent directed at anti-state, destructive activities, and color revolutions.
It has been discussed for years that Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, and the countries of Eastern Europe in politics are filled to capacity with graduates of all these Open Society courses, “leadership practices,” institutes for “democracy studies,” and dozens of foundations and communities incorporating activists. In Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine, this has long been a fairly significant part of the political community, and in Armenia and Moldova - the ruling political community. We have been discussing all this for years, but there is a kind of paradox.
If you look at the financial resources that the West spends on this activity, then relative to trade and financial flows these are mere pennies. In a year, all these institutions spent up to $200 million on a country like Ukraine, $18 million on Armenia, and $12 million on Moldova.
Let’s compare this with the economic preferences of Armenia over all these years, the opportunity to earn money in Russia and in Russia, tranches from Russia to Ukraine, the volume of direct investments over all these years, which were officially described as several hundred billion dollars. These figures are not comparable at all.
You can speak out emotionally for a long time, but the fact remains that the West, for pennies, gains political control over countries with flows with a capacity of tens of billions. These mechanisms should be studied very carefully and, where possible, adopted.
After all, incorporation into such structures by the West is carried out by recruiting representatives not from big business, but from the middle class and lower middle class. The cost of such representatives is relatively low, and the final efficiency is quite high.
At the same time, in the countries of Eastern Europe, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia, these structures managed to achieve good results, in Georgia the system is failing, and in Central Asia it is working ineffectively. All these regional features must be thoroughly analyzed and taken into account, not only for reasons of “geopolitics”, but also in order to simply reduce investment risks.
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