During the Parliament-Government question-and-answer session, Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan referred to the establishment of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.
"I greatly appreciate what happened. In general, Armenia attaches great importance to its relations with Arab countries, and we believe that there are unrealized opportunities here with almost all of them. It was ten times more regrettable not even to have diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia," he said.
Mirzoyan emphasized that over the past 30 years, efforts have been made to establish relations, but they were not successful for one reason or another.
"I can say that from the very first days of being appointed as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, I paid a lot of attention to this issue. We initiated meetings. There were two official meetings with my colleague, we also communicated together on other multilateral platforms, had phone conversations, had discussions at the level of ambassadors, visits, and as you can already see, both countries, us and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, considered it necessary to have diplomatic relations approval protocol. This is not the end, quite the opposite. This is the beginning of the process. I think, and as far as I understand, our partners in Saudi Arabia share this position, there are many directions, areas where we still need to discover and develop great cooperation," said the Foreign Minister.
Referring to the comments of the Azerbaijani side regarding the establishment of relations, that they mediated for Armenia, Mirzoyan said that this information is completely false. "I was told that there were such comments both within the Azerbaijani social networks and within the expert community. I want to say unequivocally and definitely that we have not appealed to the mediation of any country on this issue, we have not appealed to the help of any country. The mutual understanding and, ultimately, the signing of the protocol on establishing diplomatic relations took place exclusively as a result of bilateral contacts, as a result of the great willingness of both countries."
