Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanyan said that thanks to Iran’s actions and statements, it was possible to avoid the further escalation of Azerbaijan’s attack in September 2022.
“We had intelligence data that Azerbaijan was preparing larger offensives when it attacked Armenia last September. Iran’s actions and statements helped stop the further deterioration of the situation,” Vahan Kostanyan said in an interview with Al-Monitor.
The Deputy Foreign Minister noted that the issue of purchasing Iranian ammunition is not on Armenia’s agenda.
Speaking about Azerbaijan’s goals, the Deputy Foreign Minister singled out three.
“To carry out ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, to provoke large-scale military tension in the region, and to force Armenia to provide an extraterritorial corridor.”
“Iran is an important partner for Armenia. The border with Iran is of primary importance to us. We have two closed borders, with Turkey and Azerbaijan, so Iran and Georgia are our only gateways to the outside world,” Kostanyan said.
The agency, for its part, noted that Israel uses Azerbaijan against Iran. However, Iran, seeking to win Baku over to its side, supported Azerbaijan at the start of the 2020 war, without calculating how far Russia would allow it to go.
Baku, in turn, taking advantage of the Russian occupation in Ukraine and internal unrest in Iran, wanted a greater reward, namely road and railway corridors through the province of Syunik. The corridor would cut Iran off from Armenia, its only Christian neighbour and important gateway to Western markets.
