Dmitry Peskov set the frame on Saturday evening. The president, he said, will use the meeting to renew Russia's argumentation once more, and he drew a limit in the same breath: "We cannot be more Armenian than the Armenians themselves."
The argumentation has one subject. Peskov said the idea of a referendum, Europe or the Eurasian union, was put to Pashinyan by the union's heads of state at the recent Astana summit. Sergei Lavrov's interview on Friday asked for the same choice, and asked for it at once.
Yerevan has published no counter-position: nothing had surfaced on the wires by mid-morning.
We cannot be more Armenian than the Armenians themselves.
The timing does the pressing. The meeting falls on the summit's margins; Armenia's Constitutional Court takes up the TRIPP framework on 15 September; the Eurasian union's report on Armenia is due in December.
Since Friday the file has also gained weight at home. Robert Kocharyan sits in 2-month detention, and the Lavrov interview was Moscow's first reaction above spokesman level to that case.