Yerevan /Mediamax/. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said that "Russia is really interested in establishing a lasting peace in the South Caucasus,” while "the goals of the West, where the Armenian leadership is now actively searching for new security partners, are fundamentally opposite.”

“One of the main tasks is to undermine the integration processes in Eurasia. To achieve this goal, Washington and its allies are ready to take any steps, including destabilization of the internal political and socio-economic situation in Russia’s neighboring states. Intraregional contradictions are being exploited. Such partners cannot be trusted. National interests and strengthening the stability of the Armenian state are not among the West’s priorities. On the contrary, it benefits from maintaining hotbeds of tension in the post-Soviet space to weaken Russia, which in fact remains the main guarantor of security here,” the diplomat told TASS.

“The Armenian leadership, it seems, would like to seize the moment at a time when the West is showing increased interest in strengthening cooperation, including in the security sector, offering a variety of formats of cooperation. However, rash decisions that would ensure full access of the West to national databases and information sensitive to the country’s security not only threaten the sovereignty of the state, but may also make it objectively impossible to return to joint work on building a common defense space with Russia and other CSTO allies,” Mikhail Galuzin warned.

At the same time, he noted that “many risks that Armenia is facing today could be mitigated if in 2022 Yerevan agreed to the proposal to implement a set of measures to stabilize the situation on the border with Azerbaijan through the CSTO.”

“We were talking about serious initiatives, including military and technical assistance, sending a monitoring mission, assistance in training of border troops. Unfortunately, the Armenian leadership preferred to invite a European Union mission, which does not protect the borders of the state at all, but rather collects intelligence against Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia under the guise of monitoring,” the Russian deputy foreign minister said.