President Sargsyan Meets with US Senate Leaders

WASHINGTON, DC – President Serzh Sargsyan has praised America’s role in maintaining peace in the South Caucasus at a meeting in Washington with four influential members of the U.S. Senate, including its Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

Sargsyan met with McConnell, John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and two pro-Armenian Democratic senators, Robert Menendez and Jack Reed, at the start of his trip to the United States on May 5.

“The president highly assessed the USA’s role in maintaining regional security and stability, including the USA’s active involvement, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, in the Nagorno- Karabakh peace process,” Sargsyan’s office said in a statement.

Sargsyan thanked the US for its large-scale economic assistance provided to Armenia since independence, saying that it has been “aimed at strengthening Armenian statehood.”

The participants of the meeting discussed the Karabakh conflict and other “regional issues and challenges.” They spoke about ways of creating “alternative transport and energy options” for Armenia given its closed borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The statement said Sargsyan and the U.S. lawmakers agreed that the U.S. and Armenia have developed “strong partnership within bilateral and multilateral frameworks.”

That partnership seems to have not been seriously affected by Armenia’s recent accession to the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and the West’s standoff with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine. Nevertheless, neither President Barack Obama nor any senior member of the U.S. administration was scheduled to meet with Sargsyan during his visit. The main official purpose of the trip is to take part in the ecumenical service at Washington’s National Cathedral that will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Empire.

The Armenian presidential press service said this and other events dedicated to the genocide centennial were also on the agenda of Sargsyan’s lunch meeting with the American senators. “All senators present at the meeting stressed in their remarks the importance of recognizing and condemning the Armenian genocide,” it said.

Both McConnell and McCain have opposed in the past congressional draft resolutions describing the 1915 Armenian massacres as genocide. McCain dropped his opposition to genocide recognition a year ago when he voted, along with most other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for one such resolution put forward by Menendez.

The resolution never reached the Senate floor, leading Menendez to introduce another Armenian genocide bill last month. Only 20 senators have cosponsored it so far. McConnell and McCain are not among them.