Political scientist: Moscow should clarify issue of arms supplies to Armenia

If any force renders assistance to the Armenian side in wartime conditions, it continues to do so in peacetime. Azerbaijan cannot agree or reconcile with this, Azerbaijani political scientist Tofig Abbasov told Report, commenting on an attempt to illegally supply military equipment from the Russian Federation to Armenia.

"During the hostilities, Azerbaijan and the rest of the world witnessed different manifestations of sympathies and antipathies, specific actions with which the closest neighbors of Azerbaijan and Armenia tried to express their attitude to the events, as well as third-party actors who expressed their position in one way or another.

However, there certainly comes a very sensitive moment, when every word and even more so the action takes on a resonant sound. For example, if these are calls for a ceasefire, they are voiced by healthy forces. But it is another matter when individual countries are trying to influence the course of events on the battlefield by concrete actions. In this regard, there were many concerns due to the fact that during the hostilities Russian military transport aircraft, violating the sovereign rights of the Azerbaijani people and the state, delivered various kinds of weapons in order to help the Armenian army to continue its aggression against the Azerbaijani state,"Abbasov noted.

He stressed that all these flights were illegal and recorded by the relevant services of the military department and civil aviation of Azerbaijan. “It is known that many persons of Armenian nationality with Russian citizenship didn’t stand aside from the events and tried to make adjustments to the course of hostilities.

These flights were carried out in a roundabout way, sometimes violating the airspace of Azerbaijan. But, unfortunately, so far, the Russian official departments have not given an explanation that all this was illegal," the political scientist added.

In his opinion, Russia, as a member of the CIS and one of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, should have remained neutral in the course of hostilities, but it didn’t.

“This, apparently, comes from the fact that there are various political forces there that are lobbying the interests of the Armenian state. After all this, how can you trust the Russian representative to the OSCE Minsk Group, how can you believe the statements of the Russian Foreign Ministry?! After all, there are great opportunities for our country to distance itself, but Azerbaijan doesn’t do this for the reason that we believe in our joint capabilities.”

“Therefore, everything that the Russian military departments did with the active participation of the Armenian diaspora and the support of certain political and military forces left me with a really bad taste in my mouth. That’s because if any force provides assistance to the Armenian side in military conditions, it continues to do so in peacetime. We won’t agree with this and won’t accept it, and Azerbaijan is not the country that can be pushed around. Moscow and Russian official departments should clarify this matter and apologize to Azerbaijan,” summed up Abbasov.