NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will arrive in Armenia on March 19. His visit will be regional. Stoltenberg will visit Baku on March 17. He will also be in Tbilisi. The NATO Secretary General’s regional visit testifies to how dynamic international developments have become and their impact on the Caucasus. At the same time, it is worth noting that the NATO Secretary General is visiting the Caucasus not for the first time. Of course, in the case of Jens Stoltenberg, this seems to be the first visit of a regional nature, but in 2012 there was also a visit of the NATO Secretary General to the Caucasus.
At that time, the post of general secretary was held by Andres Fogh Rasmunsen. By the way, the government of Armenia is currently cooperating with the consulting company headed by Rasmunsen.
The former Secretary General visited Armenia last year, when Baku blocked the Lachin Corridor and blockaded Artsakh, and the visit became memorable with his photo taken near the Lachin Corridor blockade. His visit as NATO Secretary General, which was also regional in September 2012, took place a week after the high-profile event. On August 31, 2012, it became known that NATO member Hungary made a decision to extradite the murderer Ramil Safarov to Azerbaijan. In 2004, during the NATO training course held in Budapest, Safarov axed the participating Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan and was later sentenced to life imprisonment without the right to extradition in a Hungarian court. Safarov was released in Baku and made a hero.
Then there were reports in the international press that in exchange for the extradition of Safayev, Baku promised Budapest an investment of 3 billion dollars, and the deal was carried out with the involvement of a Russian billionaire of Azerbaijani origin, Ilham Rahimov, who, according to reports, was also a fellow student of Russian President Putin. There was no doubt, however, that any co-chair country of the OSCE Minsk Group could not be aware of the maturing deal and at least not raise the alarm about it, having rather strong intelligence services that are able to have access to the most complex information. Apparently, that Hungarian-Azerbaijani deal was awarded the tacit consensus of the co-chairs of the Minsk Group, in each case, for their own reasons and motives. However, Andres Fogh Rasmunsen was not the only NATO Secretary General who arrived in Armenia. Before that, in 2001, the then NATO Secretary General George Robertson visited Armenia in May 2001. The visit was again of a regional nature, and Robertson was also accompanied by the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Guido Venturion.
Jens Stoltenberg’s visit, which is again of a regional nature, will actually be the third NATO GC visit to Armenia. There is no doubt that in contrast to the previous two GC visits, the current geopolitical situation is fundamentally different, when there is a reality less than “five minutes” from the NATO-Russia war. This certainly creates a sharper atmosphere around the visit of the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The more acute the atmosphere, the more acute the challenge and agenda of Armenia. On the one hand, there is no doubt that NATO is a very important partner for Armenia in the context of security modernization issues, on the other hand, it is of course very important that this partnership develops without the formation of camp opposition with other important partners of Armenia’s security environment. This is a difficult problem that Armenia should solve in a more difficult and narrow geopolitical situation, but the key issue depends on the solution of this problem, the positioning of Armenia as a subject in a narrow geopolitical environment.
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