Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stressed during an interview published on Sunday that his country is not an “ally” of Russia in the war it launched against Ukraine almost two years ago, hastening to add that his government’s plans for military cooperation are not they are directed against any country.

Mr. Pashinyan added that he hoped the president of neighboring Azerbaijan, Armenia’s arch-rival, remained committed to a long-term peace deal, despite Ilam Aliyev’s statements about border demarcation.

Armenia and Azerbaijan, former Soviet republics, have twice been involved in armed conflicts in the past 30 years over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The area, which for years was recognized as part of Azeri territory, was finally fully occupied last September by Mr. Aliyev’s army. Almost the enclave’s entire population—more than 100,000 people—left for Armenia.

Mr. Pashinyan has said repeatedly in recent months that Yerevan can no longer rely on Russia to meet its defense and security needs after not getting the help it hoped and said it needed from Moscow.

In the interview he gave to the British newspaper Daily Telegraph, Mr. Pashinyan noted that since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he had said that Armenia cannot stand as an ally on Moscow’s side.

“I said that in the Ukraine crisis we are not an ally of Russia. And this is the reality”, emphasized the Prime Minister of Armenia.

“But I also want to tell you that our cooperation with the US or France or other security partners is not against our other security partner.”

He assured that Yerevan approaches its relations in the field of security “with full transparency” and “we talk with our partners about the goals they share.”

Armenia, he also said, has no intention of asking to join NATO, like Ukraine, which Russia considers unacceptable. His government, he insisted, “has not discussed and is not discussing the issue” of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

He reiterated that Armenia is considering whether to remain in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO in English, OTSC in French), a military alliance led by Russia of which it is a member.

On the prospect of a peace agreement with Azerbaijan, Mr. Pashinyan said that “the basic architecture” was agreed last year and “at the end of last year, it seemed to us that we were very close, finally, to the final text.”

But Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev, who was comfortably re-elected to office last week in an opposition absentee election, raised questions about the potential deal, saying he would not withdraw his troops from the border and that they could not be used in negotiations. Baku-Yerevan Soviet-era maps, because territorial concessions had been made to Armenia in the last century, during the USSR.