Without a Political Decision we shouldn’t Speak of NATO Peacekeeping Mission in NKR: NATO Official

“We support NKR conflict peaceful settlement process,” stated Steffen Elgersma, Senior Expert for Euro‐ Atlantic Integration and Partnership of NATO Headquarters, in his speech at “Armenia-NATO relations: challenges and perspectives ahead Warsaw NATO summit” forum.

Steffen Elgersma mentioned all the fields and components, around which Armenia-NATO cooperation is developing.  In his assessment, Armenia-NATO relations are in rather good condition, they are gradually developing, thus we need to look ahead. “Let’s take a step back and remember, when we were discussing the Individual Partnership Action Plan with Armenia in 2014, the world was in other place, today security environment has sharply changed, and this should be the focus of our partnership in the South Caucasus. I suppose, the agenda of Warsaw NATO summit will be directed to issues and challenges, firstly to the East, and secondly, to the South,” the NATO official said.

Touching upon the role of Russia in the world, he said that it’s destabilizing, which rests on absence of respect towards its neighbors and harassment towards their sovereignty. “We often think in NATO that this leads to a cold war, especially when we combine a few components: Russia’s defence budget grows, utmost importance is given to the military component on state level, we don’t know how to respond to them, but we’re working on it. In any case, we are for the concept of collective security, we want to cooperate in air, sea and land. We consider to further respect our fundamental relations with Russia, we keep the dialogue open with Russia. At the same time we understand that this creates a complicated situation for the South Caucasus countries,” Elgersma said. In his words, the Diaspora and Syrian Diaspora are crucial for Armenia, they also know what it means worsening of Russia-Turkey relations for Armenia. The NATO official informed, that they started working on Individual Partnership Action Plan, they collect ideas, and are open to new suggestions. However, in his conviction, two principles should remain in the program: respect and sovereignty.

Touching upon the issue whether there is any need for NATO peacekeeping mission in NKR, Steffen Elgersma replied he didn’t hear of such a proposal in NATO. According to him, if there is no political decision, it can’t even be touched upon. “Our purpose is to support NKR conflict peaceful settlement process, but we didn’t discuss likewise issue,” said Elgersma.  According to the latter, to start a likewise process, it’s necessary that Armenia’s authorities applied to NATO officially, and decision should be made, however currently there isn’t such a process.

By Araks Martirosyan