Armenia's Unspoken Response to Bayramov: Suren Surenyants

When silence becomes complicity: Armenia's unspoken response to Bayramov. This was noted by political scientist Suren Surenyants. In a film dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the 44-day war, Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov presented a series of narratives, the aim of which was evident—not to recall history, but to rewrite it.

In the film, Bayramov accuses Armenia of abandoning the negotiation process and provoking war. He narrates that during the first meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev on September 28, 2018, in Dushanbe, Pashinyan promised to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh issue on the condition that Aliyev would stop the border shootings. According to him, Aliyev instructed to maintain “perfect silence” at the border, but just six months later, during the next meeting in Vienna on March 29, 2019, Pashinyan changed his position, stating that he could not resolve the issue.

This account from Bayramov has a clear purpose: to present Azerbaijan's aggression as a “response” to Armenian provocation and retroactively legitimize the war in the eyes of the international audience. However, the Armenian authorities are not responding to these accusations. Silence in diplomacy is never neutral; it either indicates that what was said is true and there is no counterargument, or it reflects fear stemming from vassal dependency on Azerbaijan. In either case, Baku gains. As long as Yerevan does not present well-founded counterarguments—the documents from the negotiations of 2018-2019, the agreements made within the Minsk Group framework, and the fact that it was Baku that was violating the logic of the peaceful process—in the perception of the international community, Bayramov's presented narrative gradually transforms into a “historical fact.”