Designed — and soon set to be constructed — in Armenia, the ArmPhone and ArmTab devices are seen as a key steppingstone as the landlocked state seeks to overcome crippling trade blockades from its neighbors to become an unlikely industry hub.
“The high-tech sector in Armenia already has a long existence and now we need to take it back to an international level,” saidVahan Chakarian, president of the joint Armenian-U.S. company Minno behind project. The country was once seen as a silicon valley of the Soviet Union.
“By building an Armenian tablet computer we’ll create a brand that will make Armenia more recognizable on the world market,” Chakarian said.
https://www.rferl.org/a/armenia-yerevan-student-rally/29198877.html
It looks like Armenia might move away from Russia…
We will see. I think if they do that they are crazy. They just cannot afford to give up the Russian defense guarantees against the Azerbaizanis and the Turks. It would be suicidal. But the young people of Georgia and Armenia seem to focus more on wishful thinking than on reality.
Yes, I understand where they are coming from, but Armenia is weak economically, it is weak militarily, the demographic situation is bad, etc., so I agree that it would be suicidal for them to leave the military alliance with Russia.
But the young oh so want to believe the pie-in-the-sky lies being offered to them from the Europeans and to a lesser degree the USA. They so want to be hanging out with the cool kids in Europe, and the cool kids lead them along just enough for them to stumble and fall, and then smugly laugh at them as they try to get up.
In any case, I don’t see a bright future ahead for Armenia, if they stay with Russians, they will remain a poor and weak vassal state, if they leave the Russians, they will either get wiped off the map or at least lose a lot of territory to the Azeris and/or Turks, and even if by some miracle they managed to beat the Turkic nations in a war, they would be a very poor country destroyed by war and with more or less no friends or allies in it’s vicinity.
I hope that Georgia will fare better.
Sadly I think you are correct in regards to Armenia. Add in a huge dose of irrational optimism concerning the magical and miraculous effects of the prospect of European integration and you have a dismal future indeed. I think there is only one real hope, and that would be for all three countries of the Southern Caucasus to set aside their petty grievances, and unite in a neutral block with a focus on creating a positive space for all neighbors including Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc., and opening up international trade if possible using the greater trading power such a block could generate. I don’t see that happening, but it has been attempted in the past, and to some small degree was successful under the boot of Soviet “occupation”. Frankly, I think it was one of the babies in the bathwater that was unwisely discarded when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That is a nice idea, but sadly I think it is only wishful thinking, the Azeris will agree to no such thing until they get the territories they consider theirs back, and even then I think that it would take a very long time for the Azeris to warm up to such an idea (if ever), because hatred of Armenians runs very high in Azerbaijan.
Not really. This talk of hatred is a bit of a myth. Azeris talk a lot and do very little. They don’t really care, and most of them I have spoken to quietly acknowledge that they unwisely started the whole thing. I thing the real obstacle would be forms of government. Azerbaijan is now a dictatorship dominated by a single family, and Armenia and Georgia are ‘democracies’ to a certain degree. I suspect getting the Armenians to cough up the territories they captured in the war in exchange for real defense guarantees would be easy and beneficial for all sides. But convincing the Azerbaijan government to open up to a more democratic style would be impossible. I think that is the real problem.