“I don’t exclude the possibility that in the future we may try to liberate at least the five of the occupied regions and give you clear guarantees that Russia will ever recognize Karabakh’s independence,” said Russian politician Alexander Dugin in his interview given to a Russian agency. This politician is considered to be one of the main ideology bearers of the Kremlin and his opinions are important to Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. He spoke of such possibility to provide support to Azerbaijan in the context of a topic on losing Russia’s influence in South Caucasus. “Russia may lose the South Caucasus,” said Dugin by referring to the recent development developments in the Armenian-Turkish relations and Karabakh conflict settlement. “Through the initiative of the Armenian-Turkish reconciliation Washington is taking Armenia out of Russia’s influence,” said the politician from the Kremlin. The politician says in order to prevent this possibility Russia should have closer relations with Azerbaijan. “In any case Azerbaijan is the biggest country in Caucasus, and hardly the Americans can have reliable positions in the region without them,” said Dugin and expressed a negative opinion concerning the development of the Armenian-Turkish relations. “By making Turkey open the border the strategists from Washington want to take Armenia out of Russia’s influence and have domination in the region solely. Even though our announcements relate to the issue of reconciliation positively, this reconciliation is against our interests. On the other hand, it is not in our powers to prevent this reconciliation,” said the politician, who has some influence on Russia’s policy. By a very interesting coincidence, yesterday the Azeri foreign affairs spokesman Elhan Polukhov announced that Azerbaijan was ready to open the border with Armenia as well if Armenia “returned the liberated territories”. Certainly we may say that this politician is not serious or the Azeris have simply bought him (there has been such information in the Armenian media). However it does not change the stance of the issue. Our traditional ally has always “cheated” us in the most critical and important moments of the history, and if we exclude this possibility we will have to realize that we don’t take lessons from the history. This is what Armenians say and what they have seen in the past. In other words, we can be serious to the words of Dugin, who may become the justification of the Russian policy in the future. The history repeats.
