BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 1. The legal dismantling of the bust of the Armenian-origin painter Hovhannes Aivazyan (Ivan Aivazovsky), which was illegally installed in Azerbaijan's Khankendi city in 2021 and has no relation to Azerbaijan and its native Karabakh land, "forced" a number of Russian MPs to voice anti-Azerbaijani statements again.
Yaroslav Nilov, the chairman of the Committee on Labor, Social Policy, and Veterans' Affairs of the State Duma, is one of those who were relieved by what happened. In his interview, he politicizes the dismantling of the monument for some reason. Connecting it with certain disagreements in Russian-Azerbaijani bilateral relations and describing the situation as "part of the struggle with monuments in a number of countries of the former USSR," he asks a rhetorical question: "Did they win?"
I want to remind MP Nilov and those who think the same that the decision on whether to erect a monument to someone on the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan—be it Karabakh or any other region of the country—can be made exclusively by the Azerbaijani state and people.
This also applies to the case with the monument to Hovhannes Ayvazyan, a painter of the 19th century, who is represented as Russian and who had no relation to the region and never even set foot there.
Ramid Namazov
Azerbaijani MP