Rally staged in Armenia in protest against Russian arms supplies to Azerbaijan

A rally has been held in Armenian capital Yerevan in protest against Russian arms supplies to Azerbaijan, the Kavkazskiy Uzel website reported 10 April.


"Russia supplies Azerbaijan with weapons that other countries refuse to sell and the supplied weapons will undoubtedly be used against Armenia," the website quoted participants in a rally held outside the Armenian Foreign Ministry on 9 April amid a meeting with the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs at the ministry.


The website said that these statements along with calls on the international community to recognise "independence" of Azerbaijan's self-styled Nagornyy Karabakh were heard at the protest and the protesters demanded that the international mediators declare Azerbaijan an "aggressor".


The rally came amid shaky ceasefire between Azerbaijani and Karabakh troops following heavy fighting that erupted on 2 April.


"Not many countries can boast about rocket technologies similar to Russia and it is groundless to refer to the argument that had Russia not sold them, Turkey would have done so," Protester Artur Danelyan, said, stressing that neither China nor the USA or France were selling weapons to Azerbaijan unlike Russia, a mediator in Karabakh conflict.


The Russian-Azerbaijani arms deal also came up at Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan's meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Sargsyan said that the use of Russian arms by Azerbaijan in attacks on Karabakh "caused a major public outcry in Armenia". Azatutyun, the Armenian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that Medvedev defended the deal, saying that if Russia discontinued its arms deals with Azerbaijan and Armenia, this "could disrupt, to a certain degree, the existing military balance". (http://bit.ly/1qBqN7w)


Kavkazskiy Uzel said, quoting protesters, that anti-Russian sentiments were growing in Armenia over Russian arms supplies to Azerbaijan.


The North Caucasus jihadist website Kavkaz-Tsentr, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, carried a photo featuring Putin's poster put up on a fence in Yerevan captioned in Armenian: "Know your enemy". 


Yerevan and Baku are locked in a conflict over Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region, which, along with seven surrounding districts, came under the control of ethnic Armenians in the early 1990s. Azerbaijan and Armenia regularly trade accusations of cease-fire violations.


The recent wave of clashes has been the worst tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the former Soviet states signed a cease-fire in 1994 following a war that left over 30,000 people dead and displaced at least a million.

www.ann.az