During a meeting of the Russian and Armenian Foreign Ministers in Moscow on April 8, Sergey Lavrov announced that the OSCE Minsk Group had ceased to function. However, his counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan claimed the opposite, saying that according to his data, it functions. As proof, as soon as he returned from France, Ararat Mirzoyan received Brice Roquefeuil, the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair of France, who arrived in Yerevan on April 11. Lavrov seemed to be a bit exaggerating, but that is not the point.
This dispute over the OSCE Minsk Group reflects the confrontation between Russia and the West this time in the South Caucasus region, which can radically change the geopolitical image and destiny of the region. The Minsk Group is, first of all, a certificate of recognition of the Artsakh problem by the international community. It is not in vain that the President of Azerbaijan declared that such an issue no longer exists. Moreover, he claimed that there was no territory called Nagorno Karabakh.
Another important significance of the Minsk Group is that the international community is engaged in finding solutions to the problem, although it is clear to many that the purpose of the group's existence is to freeze the issue. It is also possible that the Minsk Group is a platform where the co-chairing countries control each other so that none of them "pulls the blanket", as the Artsakh issue determines which of the superpowers will rule the region and which will leave it.
Why, according to Lavrov, is the Minsk Group unable to work anymore? It is clear that the Russia-West confrontation excludes cooperation in such formats. On the other hand, the conflict of geopolitical interests of the three countries has intensified in the South Caucasus as well. The West is attempting to impede Russia's presence in the Caucasus, while Russia, on the contrary, is trying to disrupt the West's presence. This is the main reason for the controversy. The West wants the Russian peacekeepers to leave Artsakh, which makes the presence of a Russian military base in Armenia meaningless in the next stage.
According to public statements, it can be concluded from the recent meeting in Brussels, that the goal of the West and Azerbaijan is to push Armenia to take Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan, and they seem to be succeeding. The preservation of the Minsk Group, the real purpose of which was to freeze the issue before that, is already meaningless. This is exactly what Lavrov meant when he said that the Minsk Group had ceased to exist, while at the same time insisting that the West was trying to sacrifice Armenian interests as well as push Russia out of the region.
As for the RA Foreign Minister's assurance that the Minsk Group is still functioning, it should be understood in an allegorical way, that is, Armenia is ready to make a geopolitical decision on who to be with, Russia or the West. Mirzoyan's objection that the format of the OSCE Minsk Group has not been canceled was an attempt to avoid that dilemma.
However, the longer the Russian-Ukrainian war proceeds, in which the West begins to participate more widely, already supplying heavy weapons, the more the prospect of Russia-West cooperation fades.
It implies that the moment of sincerity to choose between them, which was supposed to be in the future, is near now, and has come close for Armenia and Azerbaijan, which infers that all the powers having interests in the South Caucasus, not only the West and Russia but also Iran, which held military games on our border, cannot but directly participate in the main events with the ups and downs of geopolitical choice. The role of Iran has started to grow, and its voice has become louder.