Armenia said on Wednesday it would host a joint military exercise with the United States next week, a development Russia said was cause for concern. The landlocked country has close military ties with Moscow and is a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation alliance. A Kremlin spokesman said that Yerevan’s decision to hold the drills “required alertness on our part,” Moscow will be monitoring the event closely.
The exercise will take place Sept. 11-20 and is aimed at training Armenian forces to participate in international peacekeeping missions, the Armenian Defence Ministry said. According to a U.S. military spokesperson, the Americans – including members of the Kansas National Guard, which has a 20-year-old training partnership with Yerevan – will be armed with rifles, not heavy weaponry. He did not specify how many troops would participate.
The spokesperson said that Moscow has yet to decide whether it will send troops to the exercises. Russia has long complained that the United States is training its opposition and could be preparing to intervene in the Caucasus region. The comments by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan criticized Russia’s role in the region and suggested that its involvement in the war in Ukraine may have limited Moscow’s ability to protect the country.
Russia maintains a large force of peacekeepers in the South Caucasus region, which it regards as its backyard. The troops helped uphold a peace treaty that ended the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But the two neighbors have been in a bitter feud over Moscow’s refusal to allow Armenians access to a highway that runs through Azerbaijan into the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. In recent months, Azerbaijan has imposed a blockade on the road, known as the Lachin corridor, which has prevented food from getting to Armenian-populated towns.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, arrived in Ukraine for an unannounced visit that was primarily seen as an attempt to demonstrate Washington’s support for Kyiv as Russia continues its military campaign in the country. The trip came a day after Ukraine’s president fired his defense minister amid corruption allegations and concerns about his ties to Russia.
While in Ukraine, Blinken met with top officials and toured an air defense battery, the first time a visiting American secretary of state had visited a Ukrainian military base. He also discussed boosting economic ties and fighting Russian cyberattacks. The meeting comes as the White House seeks to ratchet pressure on Putin over the ongoing war in Ukraine. It has warned that a failure to halt Russia’s aggression could lead to a full-scale confrontation. The visit by Blinken is the latest step in a series of high-profile visits to Ukraine by senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday. The United States has already imposed economic sanctions against several dozen Russian individuals and companies over the conflict in Ukraine.
