The Russian foreign minister was answering a question from RBK about Robert Kocharyan's arrest; News.am carried the exchange on Friday morning. His frame was historical. The two peoples' interests, he said, have been interwoven for centuries, and Russia has "more than once come to the Armenian people's rescue".
A foreign minister placing the prosecutions inside the alliance ledger is a change of register
The present tense was colder. "Now the current representatives of the leadership in Yerevan are guided by other tasks," he said, and read the case file outward: "There, one more president is under investigation, Sargsyan, who under Kocharyan was defense minister and then became president himself."
Until Friday, Moscow's public range on the arrests ran through the Kremlin's press secretary: complex processes, strictly under the law, no further comment. A foreign minister placing the prosecutions inside the alliance ledger is a change of register, and the ledger came with figures.
Lavrov's advice to Nikol Pashinyan was to stop keeping the European question pending and hold the referendum at once; membership of the Eurasian Economic Union, he said, brings Armenia $6 billion to $12 billion a year, and the arithmetic arrived a day after a Yerevan court gave Kocharyan 2 months of pre-trial custody, ruled around a hospital bed.
The file's next fixed date is 15 September, when Armenia's Constitutional Court takes up the TRIPP ratification. Lavrov's referendum has no date at all. That asymmetry is now part of the case.