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Reflecting on the April war, as well as the settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Russian political scientist, Alexander Krylov told panorama.am that the escalation of the situation on the Line of Contact between Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan was completely predictable.

“Indeed, it was predictable. For many years now, I’ve been saying that the main problem here is Azerbaijan’s policy of applying pressure on Armenia on all fronts. This also concerns the Line of Contact, which is the military component of this policy. The outcome is the passive war accompanied by frequent escalations,” Krylov said.

According to the political scientist, gradually this escalations become more extensive in their nature.
“Now it’s just another period of relative calm. When it’s over we’ll witness a new escalation again,” he noted.

Alexander Krylov believes that in this respect there can be no doubt that the escalation was unleashed by the Azerbaijani side.

“The Armenian side simply didn’t need that, as it plays on ‘keeping the score’ trying to fix Karabakh status through negotiations. Of course, the initiator wasn’t Armenia, that’s absolute nonsense,” Krylov said.

Concerning the Vienna meeting between presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the political scientist noted that the most important achievement was that the meeting took place.
“It is useless to speak about any noticeable progress without installation of monitoring system on the Line of Contact, showing which side is responsible for unleashing the military operations,” Krylov said adding that the implementation of the system is in Armenia’s interests.

According to him, to achieve all this, Armenia needs to intensify its foreign policy.

Concerning Moscow’s policy in the current situation, Krylov noted that parallel to the efforts to maintain stability, Kremlin doesn’t rule out the possibility of leaving the region at some stage.

According to the political scientist, this is a new thing in Moscow’s regional policy.

Speaking about the statement of commander of the Azerbaijani missile troops and artillery, major-general Zahid Huseynov concerning Azerbaijan working on acquiring 500km range ballistic missile system and hitting Yerevan in case of necessity, Krylov noted that the statement is more propagandistic in nature.

“Perhaps Azerbaijan has really tried to acquire such missiles, yet selling them is prohibited by international agreement. On the other hand, it would be a disaster for Russia, if such systems were used against Yerevan. I believe that’s just impossible. We have a joint agreement. Besides, Armenia is a CSTO member. First of all those missiles will be destroyed by the anti-aircraft defense systems, immediately followed by applying military sanctions against Baku,” Alexander Krylov said.