Russian border guards leave Yerevan airport

Russian border guards have officially left their stations at Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport, as US officials promised to ‘create the conditions’ for Armenia to break ties with Russia.

Russian border guards stationed at the airport handed over control of its checkpoints to Armenian border guards on Wednesday, ahead of the 1 August deadline for their departure.  

Russia had manned Armenia’s borders, including Zvartnots Airport, since its independence.

In March, Armen Grigoryan, the Secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, stated that Yerevan had informed Moscow that its border guards should leave the airport, to be replaced with Armenian border guards. 

Grigoryan said that Russian border guards had originally been stationed at the airport because Armenia was unable to control its borders alone at independence.

‘Now we believe that Armenia is institutionally able to carry out the border guard service alone at Zvartnots Airport’, he said.

Armenia and Russia also agreed in May on withdrawing Russian border guards stationed in several Armenian regions.

‘A break with Russia’

A day before the Russian border guards’ departure from Zvartnots, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O’Brien commented on Russia’s relations with Armenia and the presence of its border guards at Zvartnots at a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

During the hearing, Senator Ben Cardin, the chair of the committee, said that Azerbaijan was in control of Armenian territory ‘with the complicity of Russia’, and asked O’Brien what the US was doing to prevent the changing of borders by force, and support countries reaching out to the West for closer relations.

In response, O’Brien highlighted an April meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, US State Secretary Antony Blinken, and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen aimed at helping Armenia to ‘reduce its dependence on Russia’.

‘It’s almost entirely dependent on Russia for its energy and its economy, we need to diversify that […] Making it possible for them to make the brave steps that Prime Minister Pashinyan is leading them on which is a break with Russia’.

He said that Russia ‘had guaranteed Armenia’s security after the 2020 war with Azerbaijan and for a long time before that, and it failed, it turned its back as Azerbaijan retook the territory around Nagorno-Karabakh’.

‘That has led to a severe break where much of the population of Armenia wants to get further from Russia, so we’re creating the conditions for that to happen’.

O’Brien also expressed hope that Russia would honour the ‘sovereign wishes of Armenia’ by removing its border guards from Zvartnots ‘so that Armenia can build the relationships that it wants’.