“There have never been villages with such names in the territory of Armenia … Not only in Soviet times but also after Soviet times,” he told a news conference.
Baku publicly reiterated its demands following last week’s fresh round of Armenian-Azerbaijani talks on the delimitation of the border between the two South Caucasus states.
The ruined villages claimed by it are among eight border areas, most of them enclaves inside Armenia, which were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in the early 1990s. For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger Armenian enclave as well as large swathes of agricultural land belonging to this and several other border communities of Armenia. It occupied more Armenian territory during border clashes in 2021 and 2022.
The four former villages are inside Armenia’s northern Tavush province bordering western Azerbaijan. They are strategically located along one of the two main Armenian highways leading to Georgia as well as the pipeline supplying Russian natural gas to Armenia via Georgia.
Pashinian declared that local sections of that transport and energy infrastructure “going beyond Armenia’s de jure territory” should be rerouted “so that they pass through Armenia’s de jure territory and so that we don't have problems in that area.” He said he has already issued relevant instructions to Armenian government bodies.
Pashinian’s government has until now linked potential Armenian territorial concessions to Azerbaijan with the liberation of some 240 square kilometers of Armenian territory occupied by Azerbaijani forces in the early 1990s and 2021-2022.
Pashinian on Tuesday did not insist on that linkage or demand any Azerbaijani concessions in exchange for the Armenian withdrawal from the four villages.
Representatives of Armenia’s two main opposition groups portrayed his statements as the clearest indication yet that he is planning to cede them to Azerbaijan without getting anything in return. They voiced serious concern about such a prospect, saying that it would not only place strategic Armenian infrastructure under Azerbaijani control but also cut off other Tavush villages from the rest of the country and leave the province far more vulnerable to further Azerbaijani advances.
“He is giving the enemy our best defensive positions, the main highway and pipeline running from Yerevan to the Georgian border and so on,” said Anna Grigorian of the Hayastan alliance.
“By unilaterally giving in, not only do you not create a guarantee that Azerbaijan will not attack, but on the contrary, you give them better conditions to attack you from those positions,” she told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Tigran Abrahamian, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Pativ Unem bloc, said that even if Yerevan does not agree to Baku’s territorial demands Pashinian’s remarks legitimize a possible Azerbaijani attack on the Tavush border areas.
Pashinian had already ordered unilateral Armenian troop withdrawals from contested border areas in the southeastern Syunik province in the wake of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. That did not stop Azerbaijani forces from attacking Syunik and making territorial gains there in 2021 and 2022.
