Falsifications on “exercises” of Russian border guards in Artsakh

On July 10 Armenian branch of Russian Sputnik agency spread information that Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and Border Guard Departments of the RA National Security Service during military exercises developed a scenario of preventing the trespassers’ attempts to enter Karabakh from Islamic Republic of Iran.

«According to the programme two persons conditionally violating the Armenian-Iranian state border, having passed the border part of the signaling system, crossed Armenian and NKR administrative border and tried to hide in the mountainous area», reads the statement that Sputnik presents citing the Press Office of the Border Service of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Armenian news websites armday.am, lragir.am, razm.info informed about involvement of Russian border guards in military exercises in Artsakh too referring to Sputnik agency.  Some of the websites even embellished the news presenting that ostensibly during the exercises conditional trespassers violated not the Armenia-Iran but Artsakh-Iran border.

We were unable to find out whether Russian border guards entered Artsakh during exercises or not. However we shall notice that after negative reaction of Baku on the statement Russia, nevertheless, reconsidered scenario of the exercise that had already been conducted claiming credit for exercises only at Armenian-Iranian border. The newly spread release reads about exercises on sequence of their actions in case of preventing crossing border by conditional trespassers from Islamic Republic of Iran to Armenia.

The information was also mentioned in Russian press. On July 12 Regnum agency  published an article where the editor-in-chief of the eastern division of the agency Sergey Tarasov, referring to the abovementioned statement, wrote how Moscow, having conducted exercises in Karabakh, «is sensitive to situation change in Transcaucasia». However, some allegations in the article can confuse the reader because they contain misinformation.

Trying to increase the role of the Moscow in the region the author of the article insists that Azerbaijan should also be interested in the involvement of the Russian border troops in the region, because «there is a viewpoint in Iran, that Azerbaijan, as well as Mountainous Karabakh, is the territory forcibly separated as a result of Russia’s wars in XIX century». Meanwhile, the discussion of this topic in Iran is no longer relevant.

Besides, according to the article published in Regnum, in Iran «about 20 million azeris live in border regions adjacent to Armenia and Karabakh». Whereas the real number is about 6 million. Some hours after publication of this article, however, the news appeared in the internet that denied the statement which served as the basis for it. No addition was made in this article about it.