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In mid-January, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov announced that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had no place in Azerbaijan anymore and its activities had to be halted.

Since 1991, USAID had invested $431 million in Azerbaijan, funding humanitarian aid, healthcare and various economic and governance reforms. However, Aliyev accused USAID of "Azerbaijanophobia" and "Turkophobia" as USAID Administrator Samantha Power had cooperated with the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative.

This indicates that Azerbaijan, alongside the sham trial of the leaders of the Artsakh Republic, has adopted a strategy of outright denial regarding the Armenian Genocide, effectively dismissing the crime and any mention of it altogether.

It is crucial to highlight this again in order to expose the true nature of Azerbaijan’s policies. At first glance, the termination of USAID’s operations in Azerbaijan may seem unrelated to Nikol Pashinyan’s comments on the Armenian Genocide, but bitter experience shows that public statements by Aliyev and Pashinyan often share common ground.

One of the first "innovations" made by Donald Trump after his return to the White House was an order freezing most USAID grants for 90 days and halting the allocation of new grants.

Now, American entrepreneur Elon Musk, who heads the U.S. Government Efficiency Department, called the USAID a “criminal organization” that should “die”. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, used X to call the agency “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”

The effectiveness of Musk’s statements remains questionable. However, it is clear that his comments followed a conflict with two USAID security officials (according to the Associated Press), suggesting that efficiency is not the primary focus in these matters.

Georgia surprisingly emerged unscathed from this financial turmoil by adopting the foreign agents law that cut off much of the foreign funding but simultaneously provided compensation to organizations running social programs to continue their operations. It’s a straightforward solution… yet a complex one.

As for Armenia, the situation is once again complicated. Some people revel in the apparent ineffectiveness of grant-dependent organizations, while others believe that "the clever fox finds many ways to survive", meaning that alternative funding sources will eventually be found.

The question is what will come with these new funds? After all, the saying "search for the woman" (from the French cherchez la femme) has long been replaced by "follow the money".

Anait Voskanyan