Guyon Espiner

And if you've decided what you're going to do is important and you don't want anyone to stop you, you might choose not to tell your employer that you're running into potential danger.

This is Professor Ruben Azizian.

These days he's an academic, but in 1991 he had another job.

Yeah, we did.

And he is a respected media commentator.

And you can tell he hasn't lost that diplomatic ability to soften up the person he's talking to by saying something nice.

I'll pass that on to Jack because we're running buddies.

Yeah, I think that's the second time we've mentioned TVNZ.

That's probably enough free cross-promotion, isn't it?

Now, we wanted to talk to Ruben Azizian about the Soviet Union and modern Russia and his perspective on New Zealand's membership of the Five Eyes.

And we're going to hear from him on all that.

But when we spoke to him in November of 2025, he'd just come back from visiting Armenia, the country where he was born.

Although, he says, it's a bit complicated.

Perhaps the best known is what's commonly referred to as the Armenian Genocide.

Beginning in 1915, Armenia's neighbours, the declining Ottoman Empire, modern-day Turkey, they oversee the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, three-quarters of the population.

Yeah, now if that feels a little bit thin as an explanation, the New Zealand government, and it's worth mentioning the Australian one too, have both gone along with some version of it for decades now.

We refuse to say it was a genocide, seemingly because to do so would annoy Turkey, which would mean we would be in danger of losing access to the commemorative sites at Gallipoli that have become so important to our national memory.

No, we're not saying it's right either.

Yeah, often you're looking at a series of fairly unpleasant choices where you just have to be pragmatic.

That's something Armenia is currently having to reckon with after a militarised land grab of Armenian territory by their neighbours where their old ally Russia didn't come to the rescue.