Baku Decides to Exacerbate Relations with Moscow?

There seems to be tension between Baku and Moscow after the parties could not agree on the candidacy of a diplomat authorized to represent Russia in Azerbaijan.

Such a circumstance may indicate the intention of official Baku to express a "vote of no confidence" on the Russian side for obstructing the restoration of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, a Russian political scientist Denis Korkodinov said.

"On November 28, 2017, representatives of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry and Ilham Aliyev's administration refused to hand over an agreement to the Russian side on Georgi Zuev, whose candidacy as Russia's Ambassador to Azerbaijan was approved on the basis of the decision of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots on July 5, 2017. The reason for refusing to provide the agreement was, allegedly, the pro-Armenian position of the Russian diplomat. However, in order to substantiate their conclusions, Azerbaijani sources did not provide any objective evidence that Georgi Zuev had ever been hostile to Azerbaijan's territorial problems or had an obviously unfriendly attitude towards official Baku and its citizens, Korkodinov wrote in a social network.

Moreover, Georgi Zuev throughout his diplomatic career has always been guided by the norms of international law and business ethics, according to which illegal interference in the sovereign rights of foreign states is absolutely unacceptable.

It follows that the authorized representative of Russia cannot have any position that is different from the position of the foreign policy department of the state that he represents, nor can he contradict the opinion of the President of the Russian Federation, which occupies exclusively a pro-Russian position, but not a "pro-Armenian" or "pro-Azerbaijani" one.

In this connection, the accusations made by official Baku to Georgi Zuev of what the Russian diplomat cannot be involved in by virtue of the norms of international law and the protocol between Azerbaijan and Russia look at least politically biased.

Azerbaijan's refusal to accept Georgi Zuev as an authorized representative of Russia can be motivated by an exclusive intention to oust from Baku the so-called "pro-Russian lobby" expressing Moscow"s position on preventing the unleashing of large-scale military conflicts in the South Caucasus. So, starting from July-August 2017, the Azerbaijani media practically ceased cooperation with representatives of the pro-Russian expert community operating in Baku. Such ousting from the information space of Azerbaijan turned out to be possible in many respects as a result of the activation of the "pro-Western lobby" focused primarily on Washington's foreign policy strategy towards the South Caucasus.

Representatives of this "pro-Western lobby", for the most part, pursue as an exceptional goal the formation of a stable public opinion on the urgent need to organize a military campaign for the de-occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time, in the opinion of the pro-Western expert community, the main state "occupying" the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the surrounding areas is the Russian Federation, in relation to which Armenia is in a state of direct subordination.

Thus, the refusal of Georgi Zuev was dictated not so much by his "pro-Armenian orientation", which cannot exist a priori, but only by the fact that he represents Russia," the Russian political scientist Denis Korkodinov says. -0 ---