Russian Officials Issue Contradictory Statements on Armenia–Azerbaijan Washington Summit

On Monday, September 8, he said that it still “remains to be seen” how the initialed peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan would work. At the same time, he assessed the Washington location as “the sovereign right of our neighbors.”

“We need to see how [the agreements] will work, because all the enthusiastic reviews that were heard in the first few days after the meeting in Washington then somehow changed to skeptical assessments when the document was published,” Lavrov said, adding that “it turns out, not everything has been agreed upon there.”

TASS quoted Lavrov as assessing it as a foreign policy tactic by which “you need to do something bright, to play it up in the information space.”

“I believe that such a method has the right to exist, but if nothing follows it, then it will simply remain a flash in the pan, and we are interested in a real peace treaty being concluded,” Lavrov said.

Aside from Russia, skeptical assessments of the Washington deal were offered by ex-US official James O’Brien, who served as assistant secretary of state in former US President Joe Biden’s administration.

O’Brien’s comments, published on August 14, argued that the Armenian–Azerbaijani agreements signed in Washington would not bring Armenia a ‘substantial peace dividend,” might not resolve the conflict with Azerbaijan, and could leave Armenia exposed to further risks.