Because this time around Rubik was arriving with political projects, not business ones. The Russian passport could seriously hinder the mission he was set about to undertake.
Vardanyan was first included among the richest by the Russian Forbes in 2007. The magazine estimated his fortune at 1 billion USD in 2021. Vardanyan said in an interview to Forbes on 5 September 2022 that he had received an Armenian passport in June 2021. This was an important detail.
Why would someone renounce the citizenship of the country where one has built a million-dollar business? Only when made to. He had to play the newly assigned role.
On 8 September 2022, the ‘president’ of the so-called regime in Karabakh, Arayik Harutyunyan, met the ‘billionaire patriot’. On October 4, he offered him the position of a ‘state minister’. Arayik was most likely forced to take the step, because the chair was already occupied by the reptiloid Artak Beglaryan, someone appointed by Arayik himself from his tightknit circle. It did not seem plausible that Arayik would initiate replacing him.
Vardanyan flew to Moscow on 15 October and accepted the offer after 5 days of ‘consultations’.
A Big Stable for the ‘Big Horse’
Why did Moscow need Vardanyan to sit in a meaningless chair of a concocted and unpromising regime in Karabakh? It didn’t! He was destined for a greater mission, that is replacing the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan. Russia had played a similar hand once: In 1998, when the Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrosyan leaned towards the West and attempted an agreement with Azerbaijan, Robert Kocharyan, the then president of the so-called regime in Karabakh, was brought to power in Yerevan. Moscow was thinking of entering the same river twice.
‘Vardanyan wants to actively get involved in the political processes in Armenia. He intends to stand up as candidate in the next parliamentary voting and be elected prime minister. Rusia is basically growing a successor to the current Armenian leadership through Vardanyan’, Hraparak wrote on 15 October 2022.
So, what did Vardanyan have to do to eventually succeed Pashinyan? Everything he couldn’t and then some! Pashinyan had not been able to defend ‘Artsakh’. If Vardanyan did, he could, as Versiya newspaper claimed, become the national leader for Armenians!..
The plan seemed flawless in theory. But they had overlooked one important detail: on the way to the Olympus of the Armenian government, Vardanyan had to trample all over the interests of Azerbaijan with his dirty feet. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan had no intentions of allowing that.
On 17 November 2022, when President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev received the delegation led by the special EU envoy for Eastern Partnership Dirk Schuebel, he specifically noted that we were ready to talk about the rights and security of the Armenians in Karabakh, but ‘not people like Vardanyan, sent from Moscow, stuffed with billions of money stolen from the Russian people. He has been posted from Moscow with a clear agenda.’
Roads Closed
Meanwhile, foreign companies, led by Vardanyan, intensified their illegal exploitation of the Gizilbulag and Demirli gold deposits in Karabakh. While Azerbaijan demanded an environmental monitoring at the deposits, the attempts of 3 and 7 December fell through. The separatists did not allow the monitoring, while the peacekeepers kept out of the way. A group of NGO representatives and environmental activists retaliated with a protest and blocked the Khankendi-Lachin road. That road would never reopen for the separatists…
This protest was also the end of Ruban Vardanyan’s ‘mission’: On 23 February 2023, his political career ended in utter failure and disgrace just like it started. At the same time, it invited questions about his further fate: Can the Moor go, if he hasn’t done his duty?
It turns out, he can’t.
Gurgen Nersisyan, who succeeded Vardanyan, often preferred voicing anti-Russian sentiments, which allows us to conclude that Russia was not at all planning to replace Vardanyan with Nersisyan. Most probably, the Pashinyan-Harutyunyan camp employed the tension, produced by the closure of the Lachin road, to ‘hit’ Vardanyan.
If Moscow was to follow through with the rotation, they would have brought a more loyal man. And that they did exactly: the leader of the concocted regime announced his ‘resignation’ on 31 August and was replaced by Samvel Shahramanyan.
Plan B
Samvel Babayan, one of the famous figures among the Karabakh separatists, says Arayik’s replacement was the work of the 5th Service of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).
The service is responsible for the FSB external relations and operations. Putin also headed the service back in the time. Putin had entrusted the 5th Service with the countermeasures when the western intelligence launched the wave of ‘colour revolutions’ throughout the CIS. But the launch of the military operations in Ukraine in February 2022 made it clear how deficient the FSB’s work was, which urged the Russian president to carry out deep reforms within the service.
If Arayik Harutyunyan was indeed forced to resign by the ‘5th Service’, it hints at a change in Russia’s plans. The new plan no longer included Vardanyan: The Kremlin understood perfectly that he would never be able to replace Pashinyan under any circumstances. Which means overthrowing ‘The Pash’ would require some other plan or scenario. They ‘bet’ on the wrong horse with Rubik. So, it is high time to change horses.
OK, but what about Rubik?!
Well, he can go to hell!
But only Rubik, not his billions…
The ‘5th Service’ or the FSB could have easily taken Ruben Vardanyan out of Khankendi, should they have desired so. The helicopters made 16 flights to and back Khankendi to deliver the people, injured after the gas tank exploded in Khankendi, to Yerevan. Despite his excess weight, they could have somehow squeezed Rubik into one of them… but why?
*‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’
By Vusal Mammadov
*An iconic film by Sydney Pollack in 1969
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