Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko argued off-script in a live broadcast during a Thursday meeting in St. Petersburg.
At an Eurasian Economic Union assembly at a hotel near St. Petersburg, Pashinyan lashed out at Lukashenko when the latter insisted that Pashinyan attend the Union’s next assembly in Belarus, when Minsk will take over the rotating presidency.
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The Eurasian Economic Union is a Moscow-led bloc comprising the former Soviet states of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Pashinyan, who attended Thursday’s assembly via video call after testing positive for COVID-19, first said he planned to attend the upcoming assembly also via video before Lukashenko insisted that Pashinyan be present, providing to fly the Armenian delegation to Minsk.
Pashinyan first shrugged off the suggestion by saying, “I don’t think this is the right format for discussing these issues,” and reminding Lukashenko of Yerevan’s earlier decisions to freeze all high-level visits to Belarus after uncovering Minsk’s assistance to Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, which saw Baku retaking the region from Yerevan in September 2023.
He then attacked Lukashenko because he persisted in his efforts, while other heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, silently watched the ensuing live-streamed altercations.
AP News described the assembly as historically “narrowly written” and highlighted the unusual when the two brazenly spat out the “carefully choreographed session. ”
The altercation marked the latest diplomatic spat between the two nations following the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
In August, Lukashenko mocked Armenia’s growing ties with the West in an interview with Russian state television, to which protestors in Armenia responded by lobbing potatoes at the Belarusian embassy in Yerevan.
“Who wants Armenians but us? No one wants it. Let them expand their economy and focus on what they have,” Lukashenko said at the time.
Armenia lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory with neighboring Azerbaijan, in Sept. 2023 following Baku’s lightning offensive in part due to the inaction of the Russian peacekeeping forces deployed in the region as part of earlier peace agreements.
The incident led to a drastic deterioration in Yerevan’s relationship with the Moscow-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the political and military alliance among some post-Soviet states of which Armenia, Russia and Belarus were members.
In Oct. 2023, after Baku’s offensive, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met with Belarusian opposition leader in exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
In May 2024, Pashinyan claimed that “at least two CSTO countries” had helped Baku retake Nagorno-Karabakh, which many believed to be Belarus and Russia.
On May 17, Lukashenko met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the former pledging Baku’s reconstruction efforts in the region, according to Belarusian state media BELTA.
On June 12, Pashinyan pledged to withdraw from the CSTO.
The same day, Politico released a report, citing leaked documents, which claimed Belarus delivered advanced weapons to Azerbaijan that were presumably used in the latter’s offensives against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh.
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