Most interestingly, RL’s Armenian service says, citing its sources in the government, that Hakobyan will bring with her humanitarian aid.
We will deliberately not question whether Anna Hakobyan will actually carry humanitarian aid or only intends to do so. We will refrain from asking about the real size of this aid. We will not even ask whether she will bring humanitarian aid to Ukraine or the Armenian community of Ukraine. But we can’t help wondering about something else. Doesn’t it seem strange to Madam Hakobyan that they thought of humanitarian aid a little late, a year and a half after the war started? And are they sure in Yerevan that this one-time gesture will undo everything that Armenia had done on the Ukrainian track earlier? You may recall that Armenia has repeatedly voted in the UN against Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It refused to sign the “Ukrainian” paragraph of the final declaration of the “Summit for Democracy” in the United States, where it was invited rather recklessly. It established close ties with the Russian “authorities” in occupied Crimea. After the current war began, Russia has been using Armenia as one of the main “corridors” to circumvent sanctions. And, the cherry on top, Armenia has been sending its military airplanes to help Russia.
Now Nikol Pashinyan has decided to make a clever move and promise humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but supposedly under his wife’s name. He expects that in the eyes of Western politicians he will thus absolve himself from his earlier support of the Kremlin, and if Moscow wags a reproachful finger, he can say, “it’s not me, it’s my wife, and it’s unofficial anyway.”
And most importantly, the people at 26 Baghramyan still expect these maneuvers to help them have the cake and eat it too.
