Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko argued off-script in a live broadcast during a Thursday meeting in St. Petersburg.
During a Eurasian Economic Union meeting at a resort near St. Petersburg, Pashinyan lashed out at Lukashenko when the latter insisted that Pashinyan visit the bloc’s next meeting in Belarus when Minsk takes over the rotating presidency.
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The Eurasian Economic Union is a Moscow-led bloc comprising ex-Soviet states Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Pashinyan, who attended the Thursday meeting via video call after testing positive for COVID-19, first said he planned to attend the next meeting also via video before Lukashenko pressed for Pashinyan’s attendance, offering to fly the Armenian delegation into Minsk by plane.
Pashinyan first shrugged off the suggestion by saying, “I don’t think this is the right format for discussing these issues,” and reminding Lukashenko of Yerevan’s earlier decisions to freeze all high-level visits to Belarus after uncovering Minsk’s assistance to Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, which saw Baku retaking the region from Yerevan in September 2023.
He then snapped off at Lukashenko when the latter persisted in his efforts, with other heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, observing the subsequent altercations broadcasted live in silence.
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AP News described the meeting as traditionally “tightly scripted” and noted the unusualness when the two spatted openly at the “carefully choreographed session.”
The altercation marked the latest diplomatic spat between the two nations following the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
In August, Lukashenko mocked Armenia’s growing ties with the West in an interview with Russian state television, to which protestors in Armenia responded by lobbing potatoes at the Belarusian embassy in Yerevan.
“Who needs the Armenians besides us? No one needs them. Let them develop their economy and focus on what they have,” Lukashenko said at the time.
What happened?
Armenia lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory with neighboring Azerbaijan, in Sept. 2023 following Baku’s lightning offensive in part due to the inaction of the Russian peacekeeping forces deployed in the region as part of earlier peace agreements.
The incident led to a drastic deterioration in Yerevan’s relationship with the Moscow-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the political and military alliance among some post-Soviet states of which Armenia, Russia and Belarus were members.
In Oct. 2023, after Baku’s offensive, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with Belarusian opposition leader in exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
In May 2024, Pashinyan said “at least two CSTO countries” aided Baku’s plans to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, which many believed to be Belarus and Russia.
On May 17, Lukashenko met Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the former pledging to aid Baku’s reconstruction efforts in the area, according to Belarusian state media BELTA.
On June 12, Pashinyan pledged to withdraw from the CSTO.
The same day, Politico released a report, citing leaked documents, which claimed Belarus delivered advanced weapons to Azerbaijan that were presumably used in the latter’s offensives against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh.
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