\n Armenia said Thursday it no longer needed Russian border guards at Yerevan airport, in the latest sign the ex-Soviet republic is straying further from the orbit of its traditional ally.\n<\/p>\n
\n Russia had been in charge of border control at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport since a 1992 deal that saw its border guards deployed along Armenia's border with Turkey and Iran.\n<\/p>\n
\n At the time, newly independent Armenia did not have its own frontier troops.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We have informed Russia that there is no longer a necessity of Russian assistance in ensuring border control at the Zvartnots airport,\" Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Armenia now has all the institutional capacities to ensure border control (at the airport),\" he added.\n<\/p>\n
\n Last month, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Armenia had suspended its participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a Moscow-led security alliance of several ex-Soviet republics.\n<\/p>\n
\n Relations between the two have remained heated since last year, when Armenia accused Russia of failing to stop Azerbaijan from capturing the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenian separatists.\n<\/p>\n
\n The mountainous enclave's entire Armenian population -- more than 100,000 people -- fled to Armenia in the aftermath.\n<\/p>\n
\n Armenia boycotted a CSTO summit at the end of 2023 over what Pashinyan said was the bloc's failure to fulfil its security obligations.\n<\/p>\n
\n In a sign of its ambition for new security guarantees, Yerevan has been forging partnerships with Western countries -- mainly France and the United States.\n<\/p>\n
\n Moscow had for decades been the main moderator of the conflict over Karabakh but has been bogged down by its two-year Ukraine offensive.\n<\/p>\n
\n In February, Armenia formally joined the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite Moscow warning the small Caucasus country against the move.\n<\/p>\n
\n It is now obliged to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he sets foot on Armenian territory under an ICC arrest warrant issued for the Russian leader in March 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Armenia said Thursday it no longer needed Russian border guards at Yerevan airport, in the latest sign the ex-Soviet republic is straying further from the orbit of its traditional ally. Russia had been in charge of border control at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport since a 1992 deal that saw its border guards deployed along Armenia's border […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-129280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n