“You have no right to decide who needs Armenians. Thank God, we don’t need you and you don’t need us” |

Earlier this week, Lukashenko mocked Armenia in an interview with Russian state television and condemned its political leadership for seeking closer ties with the West.

“Who needs the Armenians besides us?” he said. “No one needs them. Let them develop the economy and focus on what they have.”

Lukashenko’s comments came more than two months after a major diplomatic row between the two former Soviet states, but the Armenian government has yet to react publicly.

On Wednesday morning, a group of activists from the small pro-Western and government-loyal party “Hanoun Khanrapetutyan” gathered outside the Belarusian embassy to denounce Lukashenko. During the protest, they threw eggs, potatoes and tomatoes at the embassy gate.

“You have no right to decide who needs Armenians. Thank God, we don’t need you and you don’t need us,” Ruben Mehrabyan, one of the protesters, appealed to the Belarusian leadership.

Later that day, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned the Armenian Chargé d’Affaires in Minsk to condemn the “act of vandalism” against the Belarusian mission and demanded that Armenian law enforcement authorities punish the perpetrators. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also criticized the authorities for failing to prevent the incident.

Hanun Khanrapetutyan and two other pro-Western fringe groups issued a joint statement demanding that Armenia sever diplomatic ties with Belarus, Armenia’s nominal ally in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union.

On June 14, Yerevan recalled the Armenian ambassador to Minsk for consultations after Lukashenko again made pro-Azerbaijan remarks during his visit to Azerbaijan. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that he and other Armenian officials would not visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko remained in power. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry scoffed at the move, saying Pashinyan wanted to divert public attention from the massive anti-government protests in Yerevan.

During a visit to Azerbaijan in May, Lukashenko said he not only knew about Baku’s plans to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh by force, but also approved them during a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev before the 2020 war. The Belarusian strongman, in power since 1994, has long drawn attention in Armenia for his pro-Azerbaijan rhetoric regarding the Karabakh conflict and arms sales to Baku.

In March, Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan met in Brussels with exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya, who is challenging Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election. Last October, Pashinyan and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan also made a point of speaking with Tikhanovskaya at a European summit in Spain.