Moscow expects that the Armenian authorities will not allow the eighth-grade history textbook, which distorts the events of the South Caucasus of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to be transferred to schools, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said in a statement, RIA Novosti reports.

The Russian MFA explained that in one of the chapters of this textbook, under the provocative title "Forcible Annexation of Eastern Armenia to Russia," the assessments of the results of the Russo-Persian war of 1826-1828 were revised, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay was called the "annexation" of Eastern Armenia.

"We hope that the Armenian authorities will not allow such a textbook to be taken to schools, and will not look down on such obscene attempts to distort our shared past," the statement says.

The Russian MFA noted that if one reads serious sources, including Armenian ones, one can see completely different approaches to the aforesaid peace treaty of 1828, which until recently was evaluated in Armenia’s school textbooks as "of great importance for the future restoration of Armenian statehood".

In addition, the Russian MFA emphasized that in this case, it is about another shameless attempt to rewrite shared history, "in the best traditions of Western propaganda and political engineers, ‘white’ is called ‘black’ with the ‘light hand’ of some figures who try particularly diligently woo their patrons."

"The introduction of such wording directly contradicts the commitments undertaken by the leadership of Armenia in the field of preservation of historical memory. Thus, in the joint statement of RF [i.e. Russian Federation] President Vladimir Putin and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan on April 19, 2022, it is said: ‘The parties, maintaining the shared approaches to the shared past, expressed their intention to continue the fight against the revision of the results of the Second World War and the falsification of history,"’ the Russian MFA concluded.