Russia expressed concern on Monday about yet another crisis between Azerbaijan and Armenia after Baku set up a checkpoint at the entrance to Latchine, the only road connecting Yerevan to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“We express our deep concern about the situation,” Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement, describing it as an “unacceptable measure”..
“We call on the parties to return immediately to the agreements in force,” which were defined by Russia in 2020, adds Moscow, deploring “the danger” created by the “increased level of accusatory and aggressive rhetoric” by both parties.
On Sunday, Azerbaijan announced it had installed a checkpoint at the entrance to the Latchine corridor, the only road connecting Armenia to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the first since the agreements signed in 2020 under the auspices of Russia, the result of a short war won by Baku.
For Moscow it is “unacceptable […] any unilateral action inconsistent with the 2020 Tripartite Agreements.
Baku claims to have created the checkpoint to “prevent the illegal transportation of manpower, weapons and mines from the territory of Armenia” to the “illegal Armenian bandit troops in the territory of Azerbaijan”.
In Yerevan, the Armenian Foreign Ministry accused Baku of “another provocation” based on “false and baseless pretexts”.
In the statement released today by Moscow, Russia also expressed concern at the “increase in ceasefire violations and various incidents” in the border areas between the two countries, “causing deaths on both sides”..
Russian presidency spokesman Dmitry Peskov also told journalists today that Russia is already in the field and developing “mediation efforts”.
“The situation is not easy and requires extra efforts and above all [dois] countries with the understanding that there is no alternative to what is defined in the 2020 agreements,” Peskov underlined.
Since 2020, Russia has ensured the security of a peacekeeping mission in the conflict between the two countries.
But at a time when Moscow has prioritized the military offensive in Ukraine, tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh continue to mount.
According to Russian diplomacy, the current tensions between Baku and Yerevan are mainly due to the “lack of progress in the negotiation process” for a peace agreement between the two countries, three years after a short war that left 6,500 dead.
In recent months, Russia, but also the European Union (EU) and the United States, for their part, have tried to restart the complicated negotiations between the two countries, so far without success.
On 19 this month, the Armenian government accused the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev, of planning an ethnic cleansing in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, whose inhabitants are forced to take Azerbaijani citizenship or leave the region.
According to the Armenian Foreign Ministry, Aliev expressed a desire to “torpedo” efforts to bring about peace in the South Caucasus and revealed an “intention” to subject the region to “ethnic cleansing” in the region, a Armenian enclave on international territory. recognized as belonging to Azerbaijan.
Armenia has insisted on the need to decouple the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, which declared its independence in 1991, from the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan on a peace agreement, in order to avoid another war in the region.
However, Yerevan continues to denounce the blockade Azerbaijan imposed on the Armenian enclave more than four months ago.
The two countries dispute several border areas, including the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-occupied enclave in Azerbaijan, which sparked a violent armed conflict between 1993 and 1994, with thousands of casualties, before a ceasefire was broken that was repeatedly broken. violated.
The Armenian separatist enclave on the territory of Azerbaijan, a neighboring country of Iran, the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh was again the scene of violent fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in September and October 2020, resulting in approximately 6,500 deaths.
Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited in Soviet times by a Christian Armenian majority and a Shia Muslim Azerbaijani minority, carried out the secession of Azerbaijan after the fall of the USSR, sparking a war that left 30,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Source: DN
