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Stopping spread of disinformation also applies to Canada

SCOTT TAYLOR staylor@herald.ca @EDC_MAG Scott Taylor is editor of Esprit de Corps magazine.

Last Wednesday, at the NATO Summit in Madrid, Melanie Joly, minister of global affairs announced that Canada would be opening five new embassies in the Baltic, Central Europe and the Caucasus.

According to Joly “we need to have more ears and eyes on the ground” as a counter to the current onslaught of Russian disinformation.

The original spin made it sound like Canada would be adding a diplomatic presence in five new countries.

However, upon a closer examination, Joly’s plan includes an increase to full embassy status for existing consulates in Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia. In Riga, Latvia, the current embassy will see only an increase in staff numbers. The only “new” embassy to be opened will be in Yerevan, Armenia.

Now, to be clear from the outset, I fully agree with Joly’s premise that Canada needs to expand its diplomatic footprint in the Caucasus.

This is an incredibly complex and strategically vital corner of the world that remains largely unknown to the majority of Canadians.

I also want to be clear that I applaud the Armeniancanadian lobby for finally convincing Canada to commit to opening a reciprocal diplomatic mission in Yerevan.

Armenia has maintained a full embassy in Ottawa since shortly after attaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. However, the reason that Joly gave for expanding, and in the case of Yerevan opening a new embassy, makes one question the competence of her Global Affairs advisers.

According to Joly, the five countries involved in this expansion are on the “front lines” and are “threatened” by Russia.

In a tweet, Joly proclaimed “since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the world has experienced a geopolitical shift. Canada must act to promote its interests, protect democracy and push back on Russia’s influence.”

Given that the entire premise of Joly’s initiative is to help stop the spread of disinformation, perhaps we should counsel Global Affairs to stop spreading it themselves.

This may come as a shock to many Canadians, and I’m sure Joly is among that crowd, but Armenia is actually a military ally of Russia.

Like a mini-nato, Russia created something called the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in 1994 in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The members of this alliance are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Under its mandate, the CSTO can deploy peacekeepers to member states without requiring a UN resolution.

Keen news junkies may recall that this past January, during violent unrest in Kazakhstan, the CSTO deployed peacekeepers to restore order in that CSTO country. Most western media reported it as a strictly Russian intervention but the other member states did participate.

In the case of Armenia, Russia maintains a full brigade group on Armenian territory as a standing deterrent to any aggression from Turkiye.

That brings us to the 2020 war in Nagorno-karabakh. The roots of this conflict date back to the bloody inter-ethnic conflict between Armenia and Azerbeijan that ravaged the Caucasus between 1988 and 1994.

The victorious Armenians secured Nagorno-karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, and they successfully captured an additional 20 per cent of Azeri sovereign territory. A ceasefire was signed in 1994 but without a peace agreement this remained a frozen conflict.

In September 2020, a giant Azeri offensive shattered the ceasefire. The conflict played out much like the early fighting to date in the Ukraine conflict.

Azerbaijan had received NATO standard training and weapons from their close ally Turkiye. Using sophisticated drones and superior tactics, Azerbaijan enjoyed battlefield dominance over the Armenian and the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh forces.

The Azeris were very careful not to attack any targets inside Armenia itself so as not to invoke Russia’s collective security obligations.

In fact the CSTO was criticized by Armenian politicians for their decision to call the 2020 war a “border conflict” of a third state (Artsakh) and not an invasion of Armenian territory proper.

In the end, it was Putin that brokered the 2020 peace deal which is presently being enforced by some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers.

Contrary to Joly’s assertion, Armenia is not being “threatened” by Russia; Armenia is instead almost wholly dependant on the presence of Russia’s military for their national security.

To date, Canada has remotely maintained diplomatic relations with Armenia via Moscow.

Given the complex divisions in the Caucasus, Canada monitors relations with the other two Caucasus nations, Georgia and Azerbaijan, from Ankara, Turkey.

A word to the wise would be for Canada’s future ambassador to Armenia to drop the Russia-bashing when setting up shop in Yerevan.

OPINION

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2022-07-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281646783840406

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