In Armenia, the realities related to Armenia, the Armenian-Azerbaijani meeting, as well as the meetings of the Armenian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister with other partners received a lot of attention in the framework of the Munich Security Forum. One of them, however, which contained quite significant circumstances, received considerably less attention. We are talking about the meeting of the Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan with the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, which receives attention in the context of another meeting, the meeting between the OSCE Chairman-in-Office and Ilham Aliyev.
As is well known, Aliyev addressed the current president and said that the OSCE Minsk Group should be dissolved, because he has already resolved the Karabakh issue. It is not new that Azerbaijan talks about the need to dissolve the Minsk Group, but it seems that it is the first time that it has raised it at the level of the president at the meeting with the current OSCE chairman. Back in 2020, while receiving the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group in Baku, Aliyev in a rather arrogant tone stated that he did not call them, he had nothing to discuss with them, he was just meeting because they came.
His audacious arrogance did not receive an adequate response, although what is it about if the creeping war that Aliyev started in 2013-14 did not receive an adequate response. And the main reason for this is that the geopolitical antagonism between the co-chair countries of the Minsk Group was deepening, the crisis of the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group was maturing, which Aliyev took advantage of. Now he is already talking about the dissolution of the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group, in a meeting with the acting president of the CSCE, which probably means that Baku will seriously start to address this issue. Otherwise, the goal would hardly have been raised at that level.
The important question here is whether Aliyev has the consent of any Minsk Group co-chair country. The other question is what position will Yerevan take? And there is a wording worthy of attention that is present in the official report of the Armenian Prime Minister’s meeting with the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, which was distributed by the Armenian government. “At the same time, the effective use of the tools of the organization in accordance with the OSCE mandate to contribute to regional stability and security” was noted in the message. What is Yerevan talking about in accordance with the OSCE mandate? If it is the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group, why not mention it directly?
Does this mean that Yerevan, in its turn, proposes to the OSCE to create a new format in relation to the security issues of the Caucasus? This will mean that at least indirectly, Yerevan is not trying to oppose Baku’s goal of dissolving the Minsk Group co-chairmanship. Of course, that co-chairmanship is not working today, and to put it mildly, there is no prospect that it could work. But the problem there is not the format, but the OSCE and the international situation in general.
In other words, the OSCE itself does not work, therefore no format can work under its mandate. At the same time, the history of the co-chairmanship format of the Minsk Group for Yerevan contains quite significant content and conflicts, which are preserved, at least as long as the group is preserved de jure. According to that, it turns out that as a result of its de jure liquidation, we will lose significant fights, but we will not gain any new format capable of significant work.
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