The head of French diplomacy, Catherine Colonna, visiting Yerevan, announced on Tuesday October 3 that Paris had “given its agreement” for the delivery of military equipment to Armenia, which wishes to protect itself from its Azerbaijani neighbor.
“France has agreed to the conclusion of future contracts with Armenia which will allow the delivery of military equipment to Armenia so that it can ensure its defense,” Colonna said at a press conference. in Yerevan.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs did not specify the equipment concerned, but assured that France would act “in this area with a spirit of responsibility on both sides and without any spirit of escalation”. She stressed that Armenia’s eastern neighbor, Azerbaijan, with its oil revenues and Turkish support, had “continuously armed itself to take action.”
Armenia, Russia’s traditional ally, historically arms with Moscow, and Russian troops have a military base in the country, as well as a peace contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Baku has won a lightning victory over Armenian separatists in September. Armenia, victorious in a first war in the 1990s at the time of the breakup of the USSR, was defeated in the fall of 2020 during a second conflict with Azerbaijan.
Determined to distance itself from its Russian ally, Armenia for its part broke in May with the cautious neutrality it had previously displayed, when Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian declared that his country was “not an ally of Russia” in this conflict. Yerevan has even provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, delivered by the wife of the head of government herself, and ostensibly seeks closer ties with Western countries.
