For most people, Armenia is not an interesting country, simply because it is where the Kardashian clan originated from, and the world has never really forgiven the country for that fact. (Nor, frankly, should it.) But, in reality, Armenia is a beautiful country with a tragic and tortured history. It is the first of the European nations, as far as I know, to convert fully to Christianity – the Armenian Orthodox Church used to have extremely deep and strong roots there. It is also a country that has been the subject of numerous betrayals, massacres, wars, and even genocides.
The last and worst of these was, of course, at the hands of the Turks in the 20th Century.
The Turks themselves do not consider that event to be a genocide. Try to talk to a Turk these days about it, and you might very easily start a fistfight. They consider their conquest of the Armenians to be a great day of victory – one of their “Bayrams”, as it were. I happened to be in Turkey a year ago when they celebrated one of those victory days, and it was a weird spectacle, to say the least. We were in Marmaris, on the Mediterranean coast, and we ended up watching a performance by three Turkish tenors, singing hits by, well, the Three Tenors.
If I didn’t have it all on video, people could easily accuse me of lying. But it really happened that way.
The reason I bring up Armenia today, is because, at the White House earlier, the Armenian “President”, Nikol Pashinyan, signed a peace agreement with his opposite number from Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. That agreement essentially sold out Armenian security and sovereignty to the United States, by way of the sale of the Zangezur Corridor that separates Azerbaijan proper from its autonomous exclave of Nakhchivan.
This, of course, makes absolutely no sense to Westerners. Nor should it, because it has nothing to do with the West – which begs the question as to precisely WHY Ornj Boi decided to stick his great fat orange head into the middle of all this.
The answer may lie in the fact that, by taking over the Zangezur Corridor, the FUSA simultaneously achieves three things.
First, it destabilises the South Caucasus by significantly weakening Armenia, at a time when the country is already reeling from the loss of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, and the ethnic cleansing that took place there – almost entirely unreported in the West, by the way. Some 150,000 ethnic Armenians had to flee the region after the renewed Azerbaijani offensive in 2023 (supported extensively by both Turkey and Israel – go figure), and the city of Stepanakaert was almost completely deserted in the process.
Second, and more important, this in turn creates a diversion and an additional set of headaches for Russia, which has a long and sad history with its republics in that region – go lookup the history of the Chechen Wars, and the attempts to destabilise Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and Dagestan, through the use of CIA-backed Wahhabbi goathumping Izzlamists, and you will see what I mean. It gives NATO an inroad to the region by bringing both Azerbaijan – a close ally of Turkey – and Armenia. The former used to be a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the regional counterweight to NATO. The latter still is a member. Bringing NATO into that region would be one of Russia’s worst nightmares, especially after what it had to do to Ukraine to stop NATO’s eastward expansion.
Third, it cuts off Armenia’s sole land connection to its historical ally, Iran – at a time when Iran itself is under severe Western pressure and dealing with the ever-present threat of regime change operations from the Israelis. Yes, the Shi’ite Izzlamick Republic of Iran, is historically an ally of the Christian nation of Armenia. Iran is a much more complex country than Westerners realise – and the region in general has extremely tangled geopolitics, far beyond the comprehension of much of the West’s leadership class.
And all of this, for what, exactly?
So that Drumpf can be seen as a great and noble peacemaker, a deal-breaker of world-spanning proportions.
He is neither. All he has done, now, is to sow the seeds of future discord and trouble. Mark my words – this is NOT a lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is only a temporary lull in hostilities, until the Azeris – made desperate by a crumbling economy and the loss of wealth transfers from their diaspora in Russia, resort to ever more brutal military means to unite their country with their ethnic brethren in Turkey.
Geopolitics, especially in that part of the world, is a long and complex game. And peace is always up for the highest bidder.
Anyway, that is enough of a lesson for one day. Let us get to the real reason you are here.
This week’s lovely lady is Anastasiya Veretnova (Анастасия Веретнова), age 21 from Mordor. She is an actual and legitimate model, working for an agency and everything, and she is apparently quite well known for the work she does in Asia. What that means, I have no idea, but she certainly looks the part.
Happy Friday and weekend, all.
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