Since the 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars to control the mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus, with Moscow and the West playing the role of mediator to put an end to them.
Yerevan said that the Azerbaijani blockade of the only land corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia had caused a humanitarian crisis there, but Baku denied this.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned during a meeting of his government that “the political and military leadership of Azerbaijan is preparing to carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Karabakh.”
“The Russian peacekeeping forces are the guarantor of the security of the Karabakh population, and if they cannot do so, they must resort to the UN Security Council to prevent genocide,” Pashinyan said, referring to the Russian forces.
He added that he had instructed his foreign minister to “launch international mechanisms to prevent genocide within the framework of the United Nations.”
Pashinyan indicated that Yerevan will also discuss with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees the return of Armenian citizens to lands in Karabakh under Azerbaijani control.
For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova considered that the peacekeeping forces “do everything in their power to prevent escalation and maintain stability on the ground.”
She added that Russia was making “tremendous efforts” to settle the dispute through diplomacy.
And the year 2020 ended six weeks after the last war between Baku and Yerevan, with a ceasefire brokered by Moscow, which included the deployment of Russian peacekeepers.
Under this agreement, Yerevan ceded to Baku vast tracts of land it had controlled for decades.
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