Karabakh talks and fate of Serge's presidency

Madrid principles put Armenia on verge of Lisbon 2
Diplomatic setback could lead to domestic crisis
by Emil Sanamyan
Published: Saturday July 18, 2009

WASHINGTON - The long-running Karabakh conflict and the associated peace process have captured unusual levels of attention from global and regional leaders in recent months and weeks.

This increased attention brought about the Moscow declaration on Karabakh made by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia last November, the first declaration of its kind since 1992.

And, last week, the statement by the presidents of France, Russia, and the United States at the G8 Summit became the first such statement since 1997.

The troika statement also provided the outline of the so-called updated Madrid Document outlining the Basic Principles of a settlement that leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were urged to finalize.

While the fundamental issue at the core of the conflict - Karabakh's status - is no closer to resolution, a certain confluence of circumstances has put the recent negotiations on a track that could precipitate a serious domestic challenge for President Serge Sargsian(pictured this week) and the administration he leads.

Key figures in both Stepanakert and Yerevan have already indicated opposition to the principles outlined in the updated Madrid principles and to the Armenian government's overall approach to talks with Azerbaijan as well as Turkey.

Pyrenean prequel

The Madrid principles are so known because they were initially submitted to the parties by French, Russian, and U.S. negotiators at the ministerial meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) held in the Spanish capital in November 2007.

Eleven years earlier, it was in Lisbon, the other capital on the Iberian or, as it is also known, Pyrenean peninsula, where Armenia's diplomacy suffered one of its worst defeats.

At the OSCE summit held in December 1996, Armenia had to threaten its right to veto of the summit declaration because it included a reference supporting Azerbaijan's claim on Karabakh. As a result, a statement by an OSCE chairman-in-office that contained that endorsement was issued instead.

Six months later, at the G8 summit in Denver, leaders of France, Russia, and the United States issued a joint statement that essentially endorsed the Lisbon approach.

By the fall of 1997, then-President Levon Ter-Petrossian appeared diplomatically defeated and agreed to a plan that would have Armenian forces pull out from parts of Karabakh in exchange for international security guarantees, but without addressing the final status of Karabakh.

But Azerbaijan's Pyrenean victory proved a Pyrrhic one. In February 1998, Mr. Ter-Petrossian was forced to resign by key members of his government opposed to the proposed pullout.

Mediation pendulum

Since the 1990s there has been a significant shift in how the U.S.-led international community approaches the Karabakh conflict. In large part, that shift was precipitated by President Robert Kocharian, who, unlike his predecessor, publicly insisted on a settlement that would formalize the existing "non-subordination" of Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

If in the past, mediators sought to find mechanisms to place Karabakh inside Azerbaijan as a self-governing state entity, for most of the last decade the focus shifted to finding mechanisms to formalize Karabakh's factual independence from Azerbaijan. That was the focus of talks at the summit in Key West and throughout the subsequent Prague process.

But in a departure from the policies of his father and predecessor Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev took a progressively tougher policy line, demanding unilateral Armenian concessions and ruling out Azerbaijani acquiescence to Karabakh's de facto separation from Azerbaijan.

The diplomatic pendulum began to swing away from Armenian preferences.

A key indication of this shift came after the August war between Russia and Georgia last year. As part of a response to a conflict that threatened to undermine U.S. influence, State Department officials sought to shore up ties with Azerbaijan by putting greater emphasis on Azerbaijan's territorial integrity in U.S. policy language on Karabakh.

According to available reports, since their original submission in 2007, the Madrid principles have gone through significant mutations. Specifically, the mechanism and timing for the determination of Nagorno-Karabakh's final status have been further watered down.

Thus, for the first time in more than a decade, mediators have offered a proposal that is more acceptable to Azerbaijan than to Armenia. From an Armenian perspective, they present only a cosmetic improvement over the 1997 "stage-by-stage" plan that ended Mr. Ter-Petrossian's presidency.

Lisbon redux?

While the proposal itself does not necessarily augur changes for the situation on the ground, it does represent a significant diplomatic setback for Armenia.

In addition to Azerbaijani activism on Karabakh, this setback can be traced to miscalculations by Armenia's leadership that are now proving costly.

Since taking office last year President Sargsian launched a diplomatic initiative with Turkey - where Armenia has few ways to leverage a positive outcome - rather than on Karabakh, where Armenians have advantages on the ground, as well as the recent precedents in Kosovo and Ossetia.

Similarly, rather than seeking to win international recognition of Karabakh immediately after its declaration of independence, the Ter-Petrossian administration focused on trying to establish relations with Turkey "without preconditions," a policy that proved fruitless.

In recent months, Turkish diplomats appear to have successfully translated international interest in seeing Armenian-Turkish issues resolved into interest in the "parallel" track in the Karabakh negotiations, but now on terms that are more favorable to Azerbaijan.

Like the Bush administration eight years ago, the Obama administration is seeking to win an early diplomatic success. And an agreement on "basic principles," independent of their substance and without an actual resolution, could well be sold as such a success.

Whether or not President Sargsian accedes to the "basic principles," Azerbaijan will seek to develop its diplomatic success. With Turkey presiding at the United Nations Security Council, it may well initiate discussions of the Karabakh conflict there for the first time since the 1990s, and try to use that as a leverage that could continue to stall the campaign for recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

What could come next

Judging from President Ter-Petrossian's experience, President Sargsian's next policy steps could have consequences for his ability to govern Armenia. The Armenian leadership is by no means monolithic, and signs of potential troubles for Mr. Sargsian are already becoming apparent.

On July 9 Karabakh army commander General Movses Hakobian(pictured) told visiting Yerevan journalists that Armenia - led by President Sargsian - was pursuing a "defeatist" policy on Karabakh, News.am and Regnum.ru reported.

The last time a top military officer registered public disagreement with political leadership in Yerevan was in 1997, when the Karabakh commander at the time, Gen. Samvel Babayan, warned President Ter-Petrossian against committing to compromises. Mr. Ter-Petrossian resigned weeks after Armenia's defense minister at the time, Vazgen Sargsian, expressed opposition to his line on Karabakh.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation and elements of the political opposition have already called on President Sargsian to sack Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian, whom they want to see blamed for "mishandling" of the negotiations with Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh's Foreign Ministry issued a statement registering public disagreement with Mr. Nalbandian's positive assessment of the Madrid principles and, borrowing a term from the Obama administration, urging a "reset" in the mediators' approach to the Karabakh peace process.

It is quite conceivable that should Mr. Sargsian continue to push the "principles," even officials at the most senior levels of government in Yerevan could potentially abandon and even challenge him in the manner that precipitated Mr. Ter-Petrossian's resignation.

While the list of analogies between 1997 and 2009 is quite extensive (including challenging elections that preceded both years), there are also differences.

Unlike Mr. Ter-Petrossian, Mr. Sargsian is known for his flexible political style that leaves open an opportunity for a new policy direction under his leadership.

The geography of the Karabakh peace process

Even for those following the Karabakh negotiations closely, the convoluted jargon developed in the peace process can sound like a geography quiz.

In the last several years alone, the Minsk Group troika went through the Prague process and Rambouillet round to develop the Madrid principles only to see Russia seal a Meiendorf declaration.

The geographic associations help provide some organization to the long process and also add color to otherwise repetitive protocol events.

Below is the geography of the main stages of the Karabakh peace process:

1991 - Zheleznovodsk (Russia) declaration
1992 - Minsk Group launched
1992 - Tehran declaration
1992 - Villa Madama (Rome, Italy) talks commence
1994 - Bishkek protocol signed
1994 - Budapest summit declaration
1996 - Lisbon summit statement
1997 - Denver statement
2001 - Key West summit
2004 - Prague process begins
2006 - Rambouillet round held
2007 - Madrid principles submitted
2008 - Meiendorf (Moscow) declaration
2009 - L'Aquila (Italy) statement

Negotiations on Karabakh could be illustrated as a simple pendulum moving back and forth from the point of rest at 3, equivalent to the status quo. In that case 1 could represent a return to status quo ante before the conflict (Karabakh inside Azerbaijan); 2, a transitional point in such a return, such as the 1997 "stage-by-stage" proposal or the Madrid principles; 5, formalization of Karabakh's separation from Azerbaijan; and 4, a transitional point to such an eventuality that a new referendum on status or unilateral recognition of Karabakh's independence could provide. Emil Sanamyan

Editor's note: For a discussion of the various stages of the negotiations, with a helpful table, see Tatul Hakobyan's "Mediators play down prospects of early Karabakh settlement

World leaders talk Armenian business, Obama in Kremlin, U.S. aid to Armenia

This was first published in July 11, 2009 Armenian Reporter

Washington Briefing
by Emil Sanamyan

Armenian issues get high-level attention at G8 summit and in phone conversations

G8 summit host Silvio Berlusconi gesturing to German Chancellor Angela Merkel with Indian, U.S., British, French, and Canadian leaders looking on, July 9, 2009. G8Italia2009.it

WASHINGTON - The presidents of France, Russia, and the United States were expected to issue a joint statement on Karabakh during the G8 summit of the world's leading economies being held on July 8-10 in Italy.

"There are ongoing consultations on the form of the statement on Nagorno-Karabakh; the content of the statement has already been agreed upon," Russian presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency after the first day of the summit.

The last time a statement on Karabakh was issued in such a high-level format was in June 1997 during G8 summit in Denver, Colorado.

President Barack Obama heard about Karabakh and Turkish-Armenian relations from his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gül in a July 5 phone conversation, according to the White House readout of the call made available the same day.

According to the readout, "President Gul updated President Obama on the status of Turkish-Armenian relations. They also discussed the Minsk Group's ongoing efforts to address [the] Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," in addition to other issues on bilateral agenda.

On July 3, the Turkish president also called his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.

According to Azerbaijani media reports, Mr. Gül's calls were intended in part to put the Karabakh issue on the U.S.-Russia agenda ahead of the July 6-8 bilateral and subsequent G8 summit.

While it is unclear whether the issue was discussed at the presidential level, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, "the prospects of progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement" did come up during a July 7 meeting between Undersecretary of State William Burns and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigori Karasin.

U.S., Russia agree on Afghanistan transit, disagree on Georgia

Russia will allow the United States to transit supplies for U.S. and coalition forces via Russian territory, news agencies reported. The agreement was made public as President Barack Obama was hosted for a working visit to Moscow on July 6-8 that was supposed to "reset" bilateral relations that have long been troubled by tensions.

The Russian move came shortly after the United States succeeded in reversing a decision by Kyrgyzstan to close a U.S.-run air base in that Central Asian country. Kyrgyzstan announced the closure earlier this year, when Russia offered a substantial aid package to the country.

To secure the reversal, the U.S. government agreed to triple the base rent to $60 million a year and provide additional aid to the Kyrgyz government despite its increasingly authoritarian policies.

Following the Moscow meetings, no agreements were reported on a series of contentious issues such as U.S. plans for missile defense in Central Europe and NATO expansion into the former USSR, both strongly opposed by Russia, which sees them as undermining its interests.

"We're not going to reassure or trade or give anything to the Russians with regard to NATO expansion," Michael McFaul, the White House senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, said on July 1, on the eve of the visit. "We are not in any way, in the name of the reset, abandoning our very close relationships with these two democracies, Ukraine and Georgia."

Speaking in Moscow, President Obama also underscored continued U.S. support for Georgia and Ukraine, saying that they and "all states should have the right to choose their leaders, have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies.

"Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy," Mr. Obama warned.

Separately, U.S. and Russian leaders also agreed to continue to reduce stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons when the existing disarmament regime expires later this year.

U.S. praised for aiding Armenia

President Serge Sargsian on July 7 visited the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan to offer congratulations on the occasion of America's Independence Day. He reiterated Armenia's interest in cooperation, the president's press office reported.

"We view America not only as a powerful state, not only as Armenia's largest donor of humanitarian assistance, but also as a state which lent support to our people in the direst times of our history, opened itself for a great number of our people, provided with the opportunity to advance and bring their contribution to the empowerment of the United States - preserving at the same time their national identity," Mr. Sargsian was quoted as saying during the embassy visit.

[Speaking at a reception later that day at the Embassy, Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian was more explicit, noting that the United States let support to the Armenian people during the Genocide. -Ed.]

According to the presidential press service, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in turn shared her impressions from the two-week tour of Armenian American communities she just completed.

Since his election last year, Mr. Sargsian resumed the tradition of visiting the U.S. Embassy around the Fourth of July. The practice was first introduced under President Levon Ter-Petrossian, but was interrupted after U.S. criticism of Mr. Ter-Petrossian's re-election in 1996. It was then resumed under President Robert Kocharian, only to be interrupted again after U.S. criticism of his re-election in 2003.

U.S. official: “Democratic reforms” may lead to more rural aid

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza this week suggested that the recent amnesty of most Armenian opposition activists held in connection with deadly clashes on March 1, 2008, was a welcome, but insufficient step.

"There were these releases that we've asked for quite some time. It's positive," Mr. Bryza was quoted by the RFE/RL Armenian Service as saying during a July 8 visit to Yerevan in his capacity as U.S. envoy for the Karabakh conflict. "We welcome that and at the same time we hope there will be more. We hope they will all be released."

Mr. Bryza also connected the recent cut in Millennium Challenge aid to Armenia to the handling of Yerevan City Council elections, which he criticized, and said there was a need for "re-energizing of democratic reforms" in Armenia.

"We are willing to work with the government of Armenia, as these other reforms go forward, to find additional money," he offered. "Maybe not in the Millennium Challenge Corporation but elsewhere, so that these people in rural areas, who are suffering sometimes from poverty, have an easier life."

Senate committee endorses administration’s Armenia aid reduction
Figures to be reconciled with House version
by Emil Sanamyan
Published: Thursday July 09, 2009

WASHINGTON - The Senate Appropriations Committee on July 9 approved a $51.23 billion foreign aid bill for Fiscal Year 2010, including $745 million in assistance to Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.), who chairs the Senate's foreign operations subcommittee, reported the same day.

As part of the bill, senators endorsed President Barack Obama's request for $30 million for Armenia and no funds set aside for Nagorno-Karabakh. The president's request had been criticized by Armenian-American groups and congressional friends as inadequate.

The Senate subcommittee includes Sens. Dick Durbin (D.-Ill.), Frank Lautenberg (D.-N.J.), Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) and Barbara Mikulski (D.-Md.) all of whom have been supportive of Armenian-American issues.

Separately, the House of Representatives was expected to pass before the end of the week its version of the foreign aid bill that includes $48 million for Armenia, $10 million for Nagorno-Karabakh, and $3.5 million each in military aid to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The two versions will next need to be reconciled by a committee of Senate and House negotiators before the bill can be signed into law by the president.

Asked by the Armenian Reporter for comment, Ross Vartian of the U.S.-Armenia Public Affairs Committee said, "USAPAC is disappointed with the Senate version and will actively support the House version in the Senate-House conference process."

Earlier this year, the co-chairs of the congressional Armenian Caucus recommended $75 million in aid to Armenia and $10 million to Nagorno-Karabakh. They also called for strengthening of Section 907, which provides oversight for U.S. aid to Azerbaijan; that provision was adopted by House appropriators.

In a news release, the Armenian Assembly cited congressional sources that anticipated that the Senate version of the foreign-aid bill would also include language strengthening congressional oversight over a presidential waiver of Section 907, and provide equal amounts of military aid to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Reporter.web.review 1.2 We are what we read

by Emil Sanamyan
Published: Friday July 10, 2009

WASHINGTON - The inaugural (1.0) edition of this review looked at the most popular Armenian themes online. This edition will go beyond general-interest subjects, like popular music and computer games, and will examine a more politically and professionally sensitive subject: Where do English-speaking (and -reading) people get Armenian news online?

Starting where most Internet users do, at Google.com, and typing "Armenian news," as I just did, the top three results you see are the aggregator PanArmenian.net of Yerevan, Asbarez.com of Glendale, and the website for the Armenian government's Armenpress news agency. They are followed by a link to Google's own very popular news site that amalgamates news from news sources all over the world.

It is not surprising that according to Compete.com, a leading Internet traffic monitoring website, the top three Google search results for "Armenian news" are also some of more frequently visited Armenian websites among Internet users in the United States. (The site does not measure international traffic.)

According to the latest data, the following are the most popular Armenian news sources in the United States by the average number of monthly unique visitors they have attracted so far this year (in 1,000s):

Site 1st half of 2009 2nd half of 2008 (rank) Change

PanArmenian (Yerevan) 5.5 5.6 (2) -0.1
Asbarez (Glendale) 5.0 3.5 (3) +1.5
A1+ (Yerevan) 4.7 2.9 (4) +1.8
Armenian Weekly (Watertown) 4.3 1.4 (8) +2.9
Armenian Reporter (Yerevan) 4.0 2.0 (7) +2.0
Armenia Now (Yerevan) 3.6 6.3 (1) -2.7
Armtown (Chicago) 2.8 2.6 (5) +0.2
Azad Hye (Dubai) 2.8 0.9 (10) +1.9
RFE/RL-Armenian (Prague) 2.7 2.5 (6) +0.2
Public Radio (Yerevan) 1.9 1.1 (9) +0.8

The data is limited to U.S. traffic only and to news sources with top-level website names; therefore the popular Groong News Service that combines Armenian news from various sources and is hosted on the USC.edu domain could not be measured.

As the table shows, most top sites gained readers in the last six months. This newspaper has done rather well since launching regular its new website last September (and our Watertown, Mass., colleagues have been doing even better).

But overall readership is quite modest even by comparison to other regional news sources. One of the leading Turkish news sites, Hurriyet, got an average of 90,000 unique U.S. visitors a month so far this year on the Compete.com scale; and Azerbaijan's Trend news agency scored about 7,500 hits a month.

Reflecting the confrontation with Russia (and also possible hacking attempts) the number of unique visitors to the Civil Georgia news site peaked at more than 18,000 last August. But a subsequent sharp drop in interest in Georgia brought the number of visitors to less than 2,000 a month this year.

Of non-Armenian sites that regularly cover the larger region, the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) had one of the larger U.S. readerships with an average of 60,000 hits a month.

But as in Soviet days, RFE/RL struggled to keep up with Pravda. The former official Communist Party publication turned privately owned tabloid, averaged 400,000 unique visitors in the same period.

In the big league, there was little competition for the Cable News Network (CNN), which averaged nearly 30 million unique visitors a month this year. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were a distant second and third, at about 15 and 11 million visitors, respectively.

Compete.com cautions that its statistics are limited in scope and are not an exact science, especially for "low sample" sites with relatively low traffic like the Armenian ones.

Indeed, our own tracking (through Google's services) shows that the monthly average number of visits to reporter.am from the United States for the first six months of 2009 was 9,095, not the 4,000 shown by Compete.com. Such discrepancies probably exist for the other sites listed here.

That said, Compete.com is also one of a few commonly available ways to analyze the relative popularity of online media. Visit the site for information on how the data is compiled.

And send your reactions to Emil.Sanamyan@reporter.am.

UPDATE: If one is to believe Quantcast.com data over Compete's, the Reporter would be ranked first in the table above.

Iranian ambassador hopeful about Silva Harotonian appeal

by Armenian Reporter staff
Published: Wednesday July 01, 2009

YEREVAN - At a news conference in Yerevan on July 1, Seyed Ali Saghaeyan, the Iranian ambassador, said he was hopeful that the Iranian court hearing Silva Harotonian's appeal would make a favorable ruling. Reports citing the Armenian-language translation of ambassador's remarks [in response to a question from Mediamax news agency] were carried by several news agencies in Armenia.

While noting that it was up to Iran's judiciary to make a decision on the case, Mr. Saghaeyan expressed hope that the appeal for clemency launched by Ms. Harotonian's lawyers would be reviewed positively.

Ms. Harotonian, an Iranian citizen of Armenian descent, worked as an administrative staffer for a medical project run by the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), an organization sponsored by the U.S. government, when she was arrested just over a year ago. She was reportedly coerced into a false confession of having worked against the Iranian government, on behalf of the United States, and earlier this year sentenced to three years in prison.

Meanwhile, a source familiar with the case told the Armenian Reporter that three Iranian men tried and imprisoned along with Ms. Harotonian have been released temporarily from Tehran's Evin prison. According to the source, the three were released because of overcrowding at the prison after the postelection arrests of protestors and were expected to report back.

U.S. officials have said the charges against Ms. Harotonian, were "baseless" and there have been reports that her health has deteriorated in prison.

Ms. Harotonian's case has also been embraced by leading human rights organizations. On June 30, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch cosponsored a press conference on the subject in New York.

Speaking in New York, Klara Moradkhan expressed hope that the recent crackdown in Iran would not negatively affect her cousin's case.

"Silva's imprisonment from the beginning was a misunderstanding. We never thought her situation now has anything to do with what's going on" with the protests, Reuters quoted Ms. Moradkhan as saying.

Obama, Putin, think tanks, Azeri gas, Israelis

This was first published in the July 4, 2009 Armenian Reporter

Washington Briefing
by Emil Sanamyan

Survey: Obama most, Putin least popular among world’s leaders

America's president is by far the world's most popular leader, according to surveys that were conducted in 20 countries and involved more than 19,000 respondents.

President Barack Obama had the confidence of more than 60 percent of respondents, followed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and German chancellor Angela Merkel with 40 percent each, the only other world leaders whose admirers outnumbered their detractors in the period between April and June of this year, when the studies were conducted.

In the countries surveyed, Mr. Obama enjoyed the least confidence in Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, and Russia, with Turkey's public opinion evenly divided.

Meanwhile, Russian premier Vladimir Putin and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered from the worst negative ratings, at 50 and 49 percent of respondents respectively.

Mr. Putin was most popular in India (65 percent), China (64), and Ukraine (57). And Mr. Ahmadinejad enjoyed the most support in Pakistan (75), Palestine (57), and Nigeria (50).

When calculating worldwide averages, figures from the leaders' own countries were excluded, but both Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama had the confidence of their own publics, at 82 and 62 percent respectively.

DC think tanks: Armenia, ex-USSR backsliding on democracy

Democratic decline in Central Europe and Eurasia was widespread in 2008, according to the Nations in Transit publication released by the Washington-based Freedom House on June 30. Freedom House researchers determined that democracy in 18 of 29 countries studied suffered setbacks.

Among the former Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine were described as "hybrid regimes" with both democratic and authoritarian tendencies, and Armenia and Moldova as "semi-consolidated authoritarian regimes."

Kyrgyzstan and Russia joined Belarus, Azerbaijan, and other Central Asian countries in a group that Freedom House calls "consolidated authoritarian states." The report singled out "petro-state Azerbaijan," which "recorded the most significant declines" in terms of democratic development.

The researchers determined that perceived democratic gains made in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan following the so-called Rose and Tulip revolutions in 2003 and 2005 were fully reversed by 2008.

Freedom House also criticized international monitors "that issued positive statements about elections in 2008 that were clearly flawed, such as those in Azerbaijan and Armenia."

Another study, released the same day by the Washington-based Brookings Institution and the World Bank, looked at evolution of democracy, governance, and corruption in 212 countries and territories between 1998 and 2008.

According to Worldwide Governance Indicators, Armenia has been backsliding in one of the six categories studied, "voice and accountability," reflecting problematic handling of elections.

Varying degrees of progress were noted in five other areas studied, including political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.

Russia clinches Azerbaijan gas supplies

Ilham Aliyev and Dmitry Medvedev in Baku on June 29, 2009. ITAR-TASS

On June 29 Russian president Dmitry Medvedev paid a previously unscheduled three-hour visit to Azerbaijan, whose leader agreed to begin to sell natural gas to Russia, news agencies reported.

The initial supplies would be a modest 500 million cubic meters in 2010, but Russia expects the volumes to increase as more Azerbaijani natural gas becomes available for export in 2013. Azerbaijan already exports natural gas to Georgia, Turkey, and Greece.

The move was seen by analysts as a Russian success in a diplomatic tug-of-war, as Moscow seeks to maintain its dominance as Europe's main natural-gas supplier. As part of that effort, Russia has been trying to secure natural gas purchase contracts from Central Asian producers.

A reflection of Russian interest was the high price it is willing to pay Azerbaijan for the supplies - $350 for a thousand cubic meters (tcm); by contrast, Azerbaijani gas is sold to Turkey for $120 per tcm.

Earlier this year, European Union pledged funds to facilitate a gas pipeline that would bring it Central Asian gas, including some from Azerbaijan, while bypassing Russia. The so-called Nabucco pipeline also enjoys strong support from the United States, but has been hampered by a lack of commitment by Turkmenistan and transit issues with Turkey.

Also this week, the prime minister of Sweden, the EU's incoming president, indicated a postponement in funding for the Eastern Partnership program, citing economic difficulties. The program includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Israel, Azerbaijan to step up military cooperation

An Israeli company will launch production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Azerbaijan, and the two countries will cooperate in other military areas, including satellite technology, Azerbaijani news agencies reported. The deals were reportedly finalized as Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Azerbaijan on June 28-29.

Since the opening of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline in 2006, Azerbaijan became one of the largest crude-oil suppliers to Israel. Israel has in turn emerged as a major arms supplier to Azerbaijan. Supplies have already including artillery systems, communications equipment, and UAVs.

Although Azerbaijan continues to threaten a military confrontation with Armenia, and during his visit Mr. Peres reportedly promised that Israel and the Jewish Diaspora "will do all [they] can to support Azerbaijan's territorial integrity," there was no immediate reaction from Armenia.

Mr. Peres' visit took place despite open opposition expressed by senior Iranian officials. And street protests in Baku were quickly dispersed by police. Still, according to the Islam.ru news service, officials decided not to hoist flags of the visiting leader's country around Baku, as they customarily do, apparently wary of incidents.

Coming up: Horserace diplomacy?

On July 6–8, President Barack Obama will visit Russia for talks that are likely to focus on Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea, but might also include discussion of Caucasus concerns.

On July 18, the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents may hold another meeting in Moscow, as both are expected to attend an annual horserace sponsored by the Russian president.

And on July 20–24, Vice President Joe Biden plans to travel to Ukraine and Georgia.

Armenians targeted in Ukraine incident

The knifing death of Sergei Bondarenko (pictured) was followed by anti-Armenian reprisals in a small Ukrainain town. Photo from Marganets.in.ua

A drunken argument deteriorated into a fight that left a local young man dead in the small town of Marganets in Ukraine's Dnepropetrovsk province.

Alla Arakelova, a lawyer for the Ukrainian-Armenian community, told Ukraine's TSN television that the June 29 incident was followed by acts of reprisal against ethnic Armenian families that forced them to flee Marganets for nearby towns. Special police forces along with Ukraine's police chief arrived in Marganets to calm the tensions.

According to TV reports, many of the local residents demanded that ethnic Armenians - all of whom are reportedly Ukrainian citizens - be expelled and the town mayor promised to check if anyone became a Marganets resident "illegally."

Armenians reportedly began to settle in the small mining town after the 1988 earthquake, while both Armenia and Ukraine were still part of USSR, but more arrived from Armenia in subsequent years, with the community numbering 50 families.

Since the Soviet collapse, ethnic Armenians along with other natives of Caucasus and Central Asia have emigrated in large numbers to Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus; in recent years they have increasingly been targeted in xenophobic attacks.

According to reports in Russian media, almost exactly a year earlier, on June 13, 2008, a similar drunken squabble in an Armenian-owned café in the small town of Verkhneuralsk in Russia's Chelyabinsk province resulted in massive fight that left an ethnic Russian dead and several others injured.

Gagik Mkhitarian, a Chelyabinsk representative for the Union of Armenians of Russia, was quoted at the time as saying that an initial fight was followed by vandalism against Armenian-owned businesses and several Armenian families leaving the town for fear of attacks. - E.S.