YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with the deputy director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, David Cohen, in Yerevan on Tuesday, May 21.
In a short statement on the meeting, Pashinyan’s press office said they discussed US-Armenian relations and “issues pertaining to the international agenda.” It did not elaborate.
Nor did the office release any photographs of the meeting, in contrast with its usual press releases on Pashinyan’s face-to-face conversations with foreign officials.
CIA Director William Burns paid a surprise visit to Armenia in July 2022. He held talks with Pashinyan and Armen Grigoryan, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council. Two months later, Grigoryan visited the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during a trip to the United States. No details of those talks were made public.
In December 2022, Grigoryan met with the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, Richard Moore, in London. A few days later, Moore flew to Yerevan for talks with Pashinyan. The two men met again in February this year on the sidelines of an international security conference in Munich.
Armenia’s relationship with Russia has deteriorated significantly in recent years, with Pashinyan’s government saying that Moscow is not honoring its security commitments to Yerevan and seeking closer ties with the West in what it calls a “diversification” of Armenian foreign policy.
