Opinion: GUAM introduces question on frozen conflicts in response to Russia’s statements

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A draft resolution on frozen conflicts released at the UN headquarters is a failure of the Armenian diplomacy, Armenian political analyst Hamayak Hovhannisyan told a REGNUM correspondent.

According to the analyst, it is absolutely clear that the Armenian envoy to the United Nations must be acting effectively so that he could respond to all challenges timely and adequately. “However, Armenia failed to prevent from putting it on the agenda, despite the fact that it had managed to do so several times by threatening to Azerbaijan to withdraw from the current format of the negotiations,” Hovhannisyan said. It is unclear for him why Armenia, in particularly, its foreign ministry, did not make effort to prevent from debating the issue at the UN and explained it by the fact that “they do not want to harm the negotiation process within frameworks of the OSCE Minsk Group.” However, according to Hovhannisyan, discussion of the issue at the UN coincided with increasing prospects of declaration of independence by Kosovo and with escalation of the tension between Abkhazia and South Ossetia on one side and Georgia on the other side.

As the analyst believes, in reality, Georgia and Moldova are more interested in discussing the frozen conflicts at the UN than Azerbaijan is. According to him, the conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdnestr are seen in the frameworks of the Russian mandate and, to avoid one-sided mediation, and taking into account the willingness to take away the peacekeeping mandate from Russia, those countries proposed the issue for discussion of the international community, while the Nagorno Karabakh conflict was a subject of a multilateral debate within the OSCE Minsk Group. “The key reason for putting the question for the discussion at the UN so fast was Russia’s statement that if the West recognizes Kosovo, it would recognize independence of the republics in the post-Soviet territory,” Hovhannisyan concluded.