Tag Archives: Armenia

Iran boosts gas for Armenia

JULY 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Iran increased gas supplies to Armenia to make up for a drop in Armenian imports from Russia, imposed by repairs to a pipeline crossing Georgia.

The deal highlights the rivalry between Moscow and Tehran for gas supply contracts to Armenia and, more widely, the South Caucasus.

For one month from July 10, repair work will halt gas flows along the Russia-Georgia-Armenia pipeline, Kazak-Saguramo.

Analysts have said the maintenance work on the pipeline from Russia has given Iran a chance to position itself as a reliable alternative supplier of gas.

Armenia imported 818m cubic metres of gas in the first half of 2016 from Russia, a drop of 7.7% from 2015. This is around five times more than Iran currently exports to Armenia.

Levon Yolyan, Armenia’s minister of energy, was due to visit Iran on July 25, to negotiate the gas supplies.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Armenia to ban Turkish products

JULY 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia plans to ban the import of 50 Turkish products into Armenia, officially because they fail to meet new safety standards, a move that could reduce its overall imports from Turkey by up to 20%, Vazgen Safaryan, head of the lobby group Union of Domestic Producers, told local media.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Zhirayr Sefilyan: A radical Armenian war hero

JULY 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Charismatic and enigmatic, Zhirayr Sefilyan, exists on the fringe of Armenia’s fractious political spectrum. He was virtually unknown outside Armenia until an armed group of his supporters captured a police station in southern Yerevan on July 17, killed a police commander and took several people hostage.

Clashes between anti-government protesters and police followed and now Sefilyan is spoken of in foreign ministries from Russia to the United States.

The slim 49-year-old has the air of a radical outsider. A Lebanese- Armenian, Sefilyan was a young army officer during the war that Azerbaijan and Armenia-backed forces fought in the early 1990s for control of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

As an infantry commander, Sefilyan played a key role one of the greatest victories for the Armenia-backed rebels when they captured the city of Shusha.

This battle on May 8 1992 is fixed in Armenian lore, as the point when the war for Nagorno-Karabakh turned in their favour.

Until that point they had been on the backfoot.

After taking Shusha, despite being outnumbered and out-gunned, the Armenia-backed rebels scored a number of victories and rolled back the Azerbaijani forces until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1994 ended the war.

Afterwards, Sefilyan led veteran groups and campaigned for better pensions, housing and rights. An intense man, his political views appeared to harden over the years and he drifted more and more towards the fringe of the political spectrum. His Founding Parliament movement calls for an overhaul of politics, accusing politicians of corruption. It has never taken part in an election and its support is estimated at a few thousand.

At the movement’s core is Sefilyan. He has now been arrested three times — in 2007, 2015 and in June 2016.

In June, police arrested Sefilyan for possessing illegal weapons. This arrest triggered the hostage-taking in Yerevan on July 17 and the subsequent clashes between protesters and police.

So far one policeman has been killed when armed men captured the police station and more than 50 people have been injured in clashes between police and demonstrators.

Sefilyan, the fringe radical, has now taken centre stage in Armenia’s politics.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Armenia’s power company to invest in rebuilding

JULY 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s power generation company Hydro Corporation said it will invest 8.9b drams ($4.2) to rebuild its small hydropower station on the Argichi river in the east of the country. The hydropower station was built in 2013 and financed through a loan from Germany’s development bank KfW.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Armed group captures Armenian capital police station

JULY 17-21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenian police and and anti-government supporters clashed sporadically throughout the week outside a police station in Yerevan that was captured on Sunday by gunmen calling for the release of a jailed opposition leader.

The clashes were the worst in Yerevan since demonstrators fought police over plans to increase electricity prices in July and August 2015.

Most of the fighting between protesters and police was small-scale but on Wednesday night riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse protesters. The protesters responded by throwing stones and charging the police. Media reported that 51 people, including 28 policemen, were injured. Police made three arrests.

PM Hovik Abrahamyan dismissed both the protesters and hostage-takers.

“What happened in the police precinct is inadmissible and should be condemned, since real changes cannot be achieved through violence,” he told the media.

As Armenia’s economy stagnates, frustration is rising making flash- points, more common.

Now, mainly angry young Armenians, have latched on to the arrest of Zhirair Sefilyan, the leader of a little- known opposition group, called the Founding Parliament movement, as a cause through which to vent their frustration.

Sefilyan was arrested last month for plotting a coup. His supporters have said the charges are false and have been spread to undermine the former military commander.

One policeman was killed during the attack on the police station. The stand-off around the police station continues.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Azerbaijan and Armenia peace talks closer, says Lavrov

JULY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that a peace agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that Armenia-backed forces and Azerbaijan have fought over, could be closer than ever. Mr Lavrov met with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in Baku a week after meeting Armenia’s foreign minister Eduard Nalbandyan. Russia has mediated between the two governments after clashes erupted in April, breaking a 20-year ceasefire.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)

Armenia and Iran agree to 90-day visa-free regime

JULY 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Iran’s government said it had abolished a visa regime with Armenia, giving a potential boost to relations and trade between the two neighbours.

Armenia and Iran had said they wanted to scrap visa requirements in June, when their foreign ministers met in Tehran. At a cabinet meeting headed by President Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian government finally adopted the new visa-free regime.

Now, Iranians and Armenians will be able to travel visa-free between the two countries for stays of up to 90 days. This is particularly important for Armenia which is short of friends in the region. It has virtually no diplomatic and limited trade relations with two of its four neighbours — Azerbaijan and Turkey.

And Iran has said there is more room for cooperation with Armenia. After the lifting of international sanctions in January 2016, Iran said it wanted more integration with countries in the South Caucasus.

This week, Gazprom Armenia said that gas supplies via a pipeline across Georgia will stop for one month for scheduled repairs, a decision that will put Armenia’s power generation sector under stress.

Iranian officials immediately responded saying they were ready to pump more gas to Armenia to make up for the drop.

Iran sends gas to Armenia via a 140km pipeline completed in 2007.

For years, Iran and Armenia have said they want to increase the volumes of electricity and gas they exchange at the border and last month Armenian state-owned power distributor Electro Power Systems Operator said it will export around 1b kWh of electricity to Iran in 2016 from the Hradzan and Yerevan thermal power plants.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)

Armenia signs clear stream deal

JULY 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Central Depository of Armenia, the stock exchange’s securities market unit, signed a deal with debt trading house Clearstream, which is based in Luxembourg but is owned by the German Stock Exchange, which it said would boost transparency and reliability in the Armenian bond market. Clearstream made a similar agreement with Georgia in January. Armenia has become Clearstream’s 56th international partnership.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)

Armenia’s Ameriabank issues bonds

JULY 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Ameriabank, Armenia’s largest bank, said it issued $15m in bonds on Armenia’s stock exchange, ahead of a potential IPO. The bonds will mature in just over two years with a coupon of 6.75%. In January, Ameriabank said it was planning an IPO inLondon, after it received an investment of around $100m from international lenders.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)

Landslide blocks vital Armenia-Georgia-Russia road

TBILISI, JULY 7 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Emergency workers will, over the next few days, finish clearing a landslide that has blocked for a fortnight the only road linking Armenia and Georgia to Russia.

The landslide has exposed just how reliant Armenia, and to a lesser extent Georgia, is on the Upper Lars highway as a link to Russia. The only other direct land routes across the Caucasus mountains to Russia thread through the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and are currently closed.

Georgian and Armenian officials said that the stretch of road near the border with Russia and Georgia should reopen on July 12. It has been blocked since the landslide hit on June 23.

And the blockage has forced politicians to look at how reliant they are on this single route into and out of Russia. At a cabinet meeting, Armenian PM Hovik Abrahamyan said that relying on the Upper Lars route was dangerous.

“It is time to explore alternative routes,” media quoted him as saying. Armenia is largely isolated in the South Caucasus. It borders two sworn enemies, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and sees Russia, through Georgia, and Iran, to its south, as its only possible partners.

While trade with Iran has improved and could grow further with the easing of Western sanctions on Iran, Armenia’s reliance on Russia has grown markedly.

Armenia turned down an Association Agreement with the EU in favour of joining the Kremlin-led Eurasian Economic Union. This also includes Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Armenia is the only country that doesn’t share a border with other members.

In need of alternatives to the Upper Lars route, Armenia asked Georgia to consider opening routes through South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions Georgian forces fought Russia for control over in a 2008 war.

Apparently appreciating the seriousness of the scenario, Georgia’s PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili agreed to start talks, marking a potential important shift in relations between Georgia and its rebel regions.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)