The presentation will examine Russian responses to the Armenian Velvet Revolution in 2018. One remarkable aspect about the Armenian Revolution was Russian reaction to it. Russian responses were quite muted, and Russian President Putin was the first foreign leader to congratulate Revolution leader Pashinyan. Russian responses contradicted its promulgated policies: its National Security Strategy in 2015 identified ‘color revolutions’ as a security threat. It also was remarkably different from Russian responses to the similar events in Ukraine and Georgia. The presentation argues that Armenia’s international structural constraints— closed borders, conflicted relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, membership to the Russian lead security organization CSTO and the Economic block— EEU, largely determined the Russian responses․ Furthermore, thanks to absence of foreign policy slogans in the movement, the Armenian Revolution was perceived as different from other color revolutions. However, there is also some evidence that suggest there might be additional factors at play, such as the Russian lack of capacity and time to interfere.
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Andranik Israyelyan is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Yerevan State University and a former public servant in Armenia. He has previously taught IR at the Public Administration Academy of Armenia and the Slavonic University. Mr Israyelyan is also an experienced public servant. He has worked as an Assistant to the Rector of Diplomatic School and at the Press department of the Foreign Ministry (2011-2016, 2019). He also worked as a Research Fellow at the Defense Ministry National Defense Research University (2016-2018), an Expert at the Standing Committee of Defense and Security of the Parliament (2018) and a Head of External Relations Division at the Justice Ministry (2020-2021).
Andranik has earned his BA and MA in International Relations at the Yerevan State University, an MSc in Russian and East European Studies at Oxford University, and PhD in World History at the National Academy of Sciences (Institute of Oriental Studies), where he defended his dissertation on Turkish foreign policy under the AKP (2013). He has authored the monograph in Armenian— ‘Peculiarities of Turkish foreign policy under the AKP (2002-2012)’, approved by the Scientific Council of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). He defended his Master’s thesis on Russian responses to the Armenian Velvet Revolution at the Oxford University and later published a monograph on the same topic with the same title in English (Yerevan, 2020).
Presented by CEERES.