Former Armenian foreign minister warns of existential security threats

Armenia faces mounting existential security threats as Turkey and Azerbaijan pursue long-standing strategic objectives aimed at weakening the country’s sovereignty, former Armenian Foreign Minister Ara Ayvazyan said on Saturday.

Speaking at a discussion organised by the Together initiative on Armenia’s security challenges, Ayvazyan said the country was no longer dealing with a conventional security crisis but was living through a national, regional and global historical turning point.

“In recent years, the threats and challenges facing Armenia have doubled,” Ayvazyan said. “We are in a period where the nature of international relations and the rules of the game have changed, and most worryingly, the cost of mistakes has risen sharply.”

Ayvazyan said the use of force had once again become a central instrument in international relations, while security guarantees that once seemed automatic could no longer be relied upon in the emerging global order.

“These realities must be fully taken into account when shaping state strategy,” he said, adding that Armenia now faces “specific existential threats and the most serious foreign policy challenges.”

Ayvazyan argued that Yerevan must reject a false choice between peace and war imposed on Armenia, and instead choose between deepening strategic vulnerability and building a policy of strategic deterrence.

“The first step is to clearly understand the real intentions and strategic objectives of our adversaries, Azerbaijan and Turkey,” he said.

According to Ayvazyan, neither Ankara nor Baku seeks peaceful coexistence with Armenia and their strategic goals have remained unchanged. He said that in recent years those ambitions had begun to materialise because a favourable strategic moment had arrived.

“Their objective is for Armenia to become a non-viable state entity, deprived of the ability to make independent decisions, increasingly dependent within the Turkic world, and under favourable conditions, fully integrated into or absorbed by the Great Turan project,” Ayvazyan said.

He identified the proposed “Zangezur corridor”, a transit route linking Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan through southern Armenia, as the central pillar of the gravest threat facing the country.

“That is the backbone of the main challenge and threat confronting Armenia today,” Ayvazyan said.