La base militare russa in Armenia è al centro di un ciclone geopolitico

Mandatory caveat that it’s written by Joshua Kucera. Particularly interesting passage to me:

>Gyumri has also recently seen the arrival of many civilian anti-war Russians who fled their country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and were drawn here by its relatively low prices and Russian-speaking population.

>But Gyumri is in many ways an ironic place to have landed. One of the recent émigrés works at a Russian-run establishment that has attracted many Russian soldiers as clientele, much to the chagrin of the anti-war workers of the business. (He asked that both he and the establishment not to be identified for security reasons.)

>He recounted one episode in which the business was forced to call the police on some Russian soldiers who were visiting. “When we told the police about the unacceptable behavior of the Russian soldiers, one of them shouted at us: ‘How do you dare talk like that about the Russian soldiers, they are protecting us!’” the émigré recalled. “The police here seem to be very close to the leadership of the base.”

>Émigrés also say that when they have tried to hold public events, the authorities have treated them more harshly than do the police in the capital, Yerevan. At a memorial event for Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, for example, police took down participants’ passport information, something that their counterparts in Yerevan didn’t face.

>In Gyumri, he said, “we are coming up against the same things we come up against in Russia, just to a lesser degree.”