YEREVAN — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is planning to visit Armenia and Azerbaijan on March 4, a diplomatic source told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry pointedly declined to confirm or deny the information, saying only that it informs the public about the visits of foreign leaders “in due course.”
Ukraine’s charge d‘affaires in Yerevan, Valeri Lobach, was also coy about the possibility of such a trip. “The spring will bring positive events to Armenia,” he told reporters on Friday.
News of Zelenskiy’s possible trip followed Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s recent visits to Germany and France during which he stepped up his criticism of Russia. In particular, Pashinyan for the first time denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying that it violated a December 1991 declaration in which newly independent Soviet republics recognized each other’s Soviet-era borders.
Lawmakers representing Pashinyan’s ruling Civil Contract party on Monday gave more indications that the Ukrainian president, who has not visited any non-Baltic ex-Soviet state since the outbreak of the war with Russia, is due in Yerevan.
“After all, the president of Ukraine is the elected leader of his country, and just like other heads of state, can visit Armenia unless there are some special hurdles,” one of them, Babken Tunyan, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We don’t care about how Russia will or will not react [to Zelenskiy’s visit,]” said another pro-government lawmaker, Gagik Melkonyan.
There has been no such reaction from Moscow yet. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on February 19 that Russia and Armenia now have “diametrically opposite views” on the war in Ukraine.
Dmitry Suslov, a senior analyst with Russia’s Kremlin-linked Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, told the Sputnik news agency on Monday that Zelenskiy’s visit to Armenia could mark “the point of no return” in the erosion of bilateral ties. Suslov claimed that it would be part of the West’s efforts to reorient Armenia towards the United States and the European Union.
