MOSCOW, February 1. /TASS/. Armenia's accession to the International Criminal Court (ICC) was planned a long time ago, but became a complicating factor in the South Caucasus country’s increasingly ambivalent relations with Russia as it coincided with the court’s blatantly anti-Russian rulings, an area expert told TASS.

On February 1, Armenia became the 124th full member of the Hague-based ICC after officially submitting documents to the court confirming Yerevan’s ratification of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute. The ICC said that the Armenian side also submitted documents confirming that "Armenia retroactively accepts the ICC's jurisdiction since May 10, 2021."

"In fact, it's just a final implementation of a decision that was made a long time ago. And it just coincided with the cases against Russian officials, and that's why it received such resonance," Stanislav Pritchin, a senior fellow at the Center for Post-Soviet Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO RAS), said.

According to the area expert, Yerevan's main goal was to get an additional opportunity to put pressure on Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has long been in conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The conflict effectively ended last fall, and the neighboring countries are now working on a peace treaty and trying to resolve residual issues.

"Armenia's initial logic was to join the ICC in order to have legal means to put pressure on Azerbaijan. At the same time, Yerevan was not bothered by the fact that Azerbaijan is not a member of the ICC, so its (the court's - TASS) rulings would not translate into automatic liability on the part of Azerbaijan. And, thus, there was a collision: Armenians wanted to be able to put pressure on Azerbaijan, but ultimately it became such a fraught psychological and political moment that brought very negative aspects to our [bilateral Russian-Armenian] cooperation," the expert told TASS.

Moscow called Armenia's accession to the ICC an absolutely unfriendly step. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said that the ICC, which issued arrest warrants for top Russian officials some time ago, has nothing to do with justice; rather, it is a highly politicized pro-Western structure that executes orders to prosecute figures who are undesirable to the West. At the same time, the senior diplomat pointed out that these warrants are "absolutely legally null and void." On his part, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that Yerevan is not changing its foreign policy orientation. He noted that the issue of ratification of the Rome Statute is in no way directed against Russia and was initiated before the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to him, the Rome Statute provides an opportunity to regulate relations with individual countries on a bilateral basis.