Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 7 – After Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan used Armenian in addressing to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting at the end of August, pro-Kremlin commentators in Moscow were outraged and suggested his move recalled what the Baltic countries and Ukrainian leaders had done earlier.
The most extreme of these said that what had happened in those countries began “precisely when their elites began demonstratively ‘forgetting’ Russia as the language of inter-internet communication” and using their own national languages instead (charter97.org/ru/news/2026/9/1/696892/ ).
And they pointed out that all the other leaders of the former Soviet republics at the SCO meeting, including those of Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan had used Russian, which they argued was entirely appropriate at such times to ensure better communication.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was also distressed but somewhat more measured in his words. He acknowledged that what Pashinyan had done was “a signal to assert Armenia’s sovereignty” but added that “frankly, we didn’t understand why that couldn’t be stated in Russian” (charter97.org/ru/news/2026/9/7/697541/).
What is striking is that both Russian commentators and the Kremlin spokesman seemed more upset by this use of the national language of Armenia than they did by the declaration Pashinyan made only a few days before the SCO meeting that Yerevan no longer considers Russia to be a strategic partner.
This is not the first time Moscow has been angry about the language used by heads of former Soviet republics. In 2024, Russians were very upset when Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomar Tokayev, used Chinese in Beijing but responded to Russians in Kazakh (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/kazakhstan-presidents-use-of-chinese-in.html).
No comments:
Post a Comment