-1522753886-(1)-1522757530.jpg "Armenia’s New Challenges: How Should the West Respond?")
Jeffrey Mankoff, Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, Miriam Lanskoy the Senior Director, Russia and Eurasia, National Endowment for Democracy, Paul Stronski the Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Hon. Kenneth Yalowitz the Global Fellow, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center attended the panel discussion.
Miriam Lanskoy, senior director for Russia and Eurasia at the National Endowment for Democracy, argued that the current geopolitical shift in the region, particularly a Russian-Turkish rapprochement and stronger Azerbaijan-Russia relations, resulted in Armenia looking for support from the European Union and the United States.
Though such a shift is creating new opportunities for the West, it also carries danger: Lanskoy warned that every time when global powers have rearranged their stances, “there was a war in the Caucasus.”
The conflict over Karabakh dominated the discussion; Jeffrey Mankoff, CSIS’s Deputy Director for the Russia and Eurasia Program, in his opening remarks said that on his way to the event, he had been notified that today’s is the second anniversary of the Four-Day War the outbreak of fighting in April 2016, the worst violence the conflict has seen since a ceasefire was signed in 1994.
Russian arms sales fueled the escalation of the conflict, argued Kenneth Yalowitz, a global fellow at Kennan Institute and former US ambassador to Belarus and Georgia. "The question is, do Russia want peace or wants the same situation of providing the arms for both sides of the conflict", Yalowitz said.
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