“There may be a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” said the head of the US surveillance service Dennis Blair during the US Senate Surveillance committee session on Tuesday. He said that the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev considers the former Soviet states as a zone of privileged interests, which may undermine the relations between Washington and Moscow. It is worth mentioning that the Stratfor research center, which mainly reflects the opinions of the American leadership, released a message in which they did not exclude the possibility of a war. “It is not excluded that the situation in Karabakh may go out of the control of the super states,” write the experts of the Stratfor. Certainly such announcements of experts are connected with the current phase of the conflict negotiations. It means that the Americans make the parties understand that if either of the parties tries to give up in the final phase of the negotiations (there are rumors about it in the recent times), at least the US will not guarantee peace. Definitely this pressure, which was like a hint, has been passed to the Armenian leadership directly. In addition, by coincidence during the last week different experts of the government and even ARF representatives standing close to the government did not exclude such possibility of war either, even there are rumors in media that the Armenian armed forces are working on the map and timeline of taking the forces out of the liberated lands. In a word, the West is frightening the Armenian government with the possibility of war, and the government is frightening the society with the same thing. The calculation is that definitely the Armenian society will prefer to give the liberated lands rather than enter into a new war, thus making it easier to sign documents on the settlement of Karabakh conflict. As the Minsk Group co-chairmen like to say, it is called “a process of preparation of the societies.”
