Exclusive | Armenia looks to deepen ties with China for foreign policy beyond Russia

“Not only is there no impediment and any obstacle on the way of deepening our relations, but also there is openness and readiness to deepen these relations without any limitations,” Armenia’s top diplomat Ararat Mirzoyan told the South China Morning Post in an exclusive interview in Beijing.

Unlike Georgia and Azerbaijan, Armenia is the only one of the three South Caucasus countries yet to establish a strategic partnership with China, but Mirzoyan said both sides were ready to elevate bilateral ties to a higher level.

“I already mentioned that with our Chinese colleagues. We see the need for levelling up our relations to this and we noted the strategic nature of our relations, and we see the mutual interest in levelling up these relations officially as well,” he said.

Mirzoyan made the comments on the sidelines of his visit to the Chinese capital last week, when he was hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The trip was Mirzoyan’s first official visit to China since becoming foreign minister in 2021. It comes as Armenia is actively diversifying its foreign policy following the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, when it lost much of the region to Azerbaijan before Russia brokered a truce.

The 44-day conflict in 2020 resulted in the deaths of more than 3,800 Armenian soldiers and more than 2,700 Azerbaijani forces. After Azerbaijan breached the ceasefire and launched a large-scale military offensive against the self-declared breakaway state of Artsakh in September 2023, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Upset with Russia’s failure to intervene, Armenia announced in June last year that it would withdraw from the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a Moscow-led military alliance of several post-Soviet states.