The "American wind of change" begins to blow into the sails of Armenia

Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan is on a visit to the United States. There he has already met and held talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and with Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The sides actively discussed the situation in Transcaucasia, in Nagorno-Karabakh and even touched upon the issue of "the importance of resuming the work of the OSCE Minsk Group”. The Group is currently collapsed due to the destructive position of the co-chairs from the United States and France due to the Ukrainian crisis.

Mirzoyan will have more meetings in Washington, including in the format of the Armenian-American strategic dialogue, at the Atlantic Partnership Forum and with high-ranking representatives of the US Congress. So Mirzoyan's overseas visit is called extraordinary, since for the first time in almost 10 years, the negotiations of the heads of diplomacy of the two countries are held without reference to any specific international format or only to the Karabakh conflict.

But it's not just that. The official representative of the US State Department, Ned Price, said that in the relations between the US and Armenia, "things are moving towards strategic dialogue”. Now let's feel the difference.

Recently, there has been a certain crisis in Armenian-American relations. Thus, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but was not received by US President Joe Biden.

The paradox here is that Pashinyan's coming to power in Armenia in May 2018 was accompanied by loud statements about his readiness to begin democratic transformations. But then it came to the point that Pashinyan repeatedly publicly reproached the United States for not helping Armenia after the "revolution". Moreover, the Americans behaved passively during the second Karabakh war. As a result, on November 9, 2020, a peace agreement was signed in the format of three – Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

After that, Washington declared its readiness to intercept, together with France, the initiative in the region in the format of the Minsk Group. But it fell apart. Now the United States, as Mirzoyan's visit shows, is moving to building bilateral relations of a "special type" in the region.

And it is no coincidence that such a new policy coincides with the Ukrainian crisis, when the United States does not hide its intentions to change the geopolitical position of Transcaucasia, to undermine Russia's dominant position there. It is for this purpose that Washington decided to resume direct contacts with Yerevan, bringing them to the level of strategic dialogue.

Washington is preparing another manoeuvre. It wants to take control of the Turkish-Armenian settlement process in order not only to reduce the level of the Turkish threat in the perception of the Armenian society, but also to achieve Armenia's revision of the strategic alliance with Russia.

Within the framework of this logic, the United States can continue to pay special attention to Yerevan and offer it new diplomatic initiatives to give impetus to "breakthrough events". As for Yerevan, it is embarking on a dangerous path of slippery political and diplomatic manoeuvring in the face of confrontation between Russia and the West.

Elena Panina, Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute