Day: February 3, 2024

By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Armenia can no longer rely on Russia as its main defence and military partner because Moscow has repeatedly let it down so Yerevan must think about forging closer ties with the United States and France, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.

Armenia, a former Soviet republic bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey, has long relied on Russia as a big power ally and hosts a Russian military base in Gyumri, about 90 km (55 miles) northwest of the capital, and other facilities.

But Pashinyan, a former journalist who came to power in 2018 after a wave of street protests which he casts as a revolution, has angered the Kremlin by questioning the foundations of the alliance.

“We need to understand who we can really maintain military-technical and defence relations with,” Pashinyan told Armenian Public Radio when asked about reform of Armenia’s armed forces.

“Previously, this problem was simple because there was no such question and there was no difficulty in creating a concept. Previously, 95-97% of our defense relations were with the Russian Federation. Now this cannot be for both objective and subjective reasons,” he said.

Pashinyan said Armenia should think about what security ties it should build with the United States, France, India and Georgia.

He questioned whether Armenia should remain a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), and said Armenia needed a new national security strategy and would strengthen its army.

Since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has faced competition from the United States for dominance of what were once Soviet republics and before that parts of the Russian empire.

Pashinyan says Russia failed Armenia when Azerbaijan last year launched a lightning-fast military operation that took back control over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, triggering an outflow of ethnic Armenians living there.

Russia says that Pashinyan’s own failure to navigate the complex rivalries of the South Caucasus was to blame for the defeat of ethnic Armenian fighters in Karabakh, and has cautioned Yerevan that the West is trying to drive a wedge between Armenia and Russia.

Azerbaijan has accused France of sowing the seeds of a new war by supplying arms to Armenia, which is also being courted by the United States.

Pashinyan last month discussed cooperation with Javier Colomina, the NATO Secretary General’s special representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia.

President Vladimir Putin last month said it was not in Armenia’s interests for it to leave the CSTO.

(Reporting by Guy FaulconbridgeEditing by Andrew Osborn)

The mother of a teenage boy who shot dead four students at his high school in the United States took the stand for the second day on Friday at her high-profile trial on involuntary manslaughter charges.

Jennifer Crumbley, 45, and her 47-year-old husband James Crumbley are each charged with four counts of manslaughter. They are reportedly the first parents of a school shooter to face felony charges in the US for the actions of their child.

Their son, Ethan Crumbley, 17, is serving a life sentence for the November 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan which left four students between the ages of 14 and 17 dead.

During the trial, Brian Meloche, who is a long-time friend of Jennifer, said that the two had been having an affair when Ethan carried out the school shooting. She had confirmed they had an affair while testifying on Thursday.

According to a report, Jennifer and Brian, a firefighter chief, also held sex parties at hotels.

They would often find strangers on a swingers app called Adult Friend Finder and arrange “meet-ups” with them at a hotel after work, the New York Post reported citing prosecutors.

Jennifer admitted to using the app to “arrange for other people to meet us there” but claimed she was going to hotels after work “on business”, the report said.

Prosecutor Says Jennifer Crumbley Bears Responsibility In Son’s School Shooting

Earlier on Thursday, Michigan prosecutors told jurors that Jennifer Crumbley failed to do several “tragically small and easy things” that could have prevented four deaths.

Prosecutor Marc Keast told jurors during his opening that Jennifer knew her son was in a “downward spiral” mentally, and that only she and her husband could have known of the danger that Ethan posed to others, and that he had access to a gun.

“The evidence will show you that she didn’t pull the trigger, but she is responsible for those deaths,” Keast said.

“She didn’t do any number of tragically small and easy things that would have prevented all this from happening,” he added.

Shannon Smith, Jennifer Crumbley’s defense attorney, said during her own opening that her client had no way of knowing that her son was going to kill four of his classmates.

“Jennifer Crumbley was the mother to a 15-year-old son and she did not have it on her radar in anyway that there was any mental disturbance, that her son would ever take a gun into a school, that her son would ever shoot people,” Smith told jurors.

Smith added that it was James Crumbley – and not Jennifer – who was in charge of making sure that a trigger lock was on the gun that Ethan used in the shooting.