Paris has in recent months ramped up military cooperation with Yerevan with contracts and training. Arms sales include Thales-made GM200 air surveillance radars, while talks are underway on contracts for MBDA-made Mistral missiles.
Earlier on Tuesday, Azerbaijan accused France of undermining the stability of the turbulent region, less than a year since Baku itself launched a military offensive against ethnic Armenian forces in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“France’s equipping of Armenia with lethal and offensive artillery installations and other types of weapons, despite the warning from the Azerbaijani side, is further evidence of France’s provocative activities in the South Caucasus,” said Azerbaijan’s defense ministry in a statement.
However, Armenia — and France — accuse Azerbaijan of trying to settle a decades-old conflict by force and of seeking to disrupt the conclusion of a peace agreement between the two former Soviet republics.
“Azerbaijan’s practice of predicting regional escalations at every opportunity is alarming,” Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The ministry added it “proves” Azerbaijan intends to avoid forging a peace deal with Armenia with an eye to launching new aggression after the COP29 U.N. climate change conference in Baku in November.
Russia has historically armed both Azerbaijan and Armenia, providing the weaponry used in a spate of wars between the two countries since the fall of the Soviet Union. A bitter conflict in the 1990s saw hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced from inside their own borders, and Armenian forces take control of Nagorno-Karabakh.
