“There has never been an unbiased Russian mediation in South Caucasian conflicts”, Interview with Dr Martin Malek

Question: Last year Armenia and Azerbaijan held talks and ended up signing the Moscow Declaration - the first joint document since the beginning of a cease-fire in 1994. What do you think are the prospects for a peace process tackling the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh? Will the news concerning the new Russian military deliveries to Armenia amounting to $800 million negatively affect Russia’s mediation?Malek: There has never been an unbiased, non-partisan “Russian mediation” in South Caucasian “hot” and then “frozen conflicts”. Moscow is certainly no honest broker, but a party in all of these conflicts and tries to manipulate them in order to promote what it calls its interests in the region. It is impossible not to realize that Moscow’s allies in the South Caucasus so far have never been defeated – and this unites Armenia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia...