The leaders of the two South Caucasus nations as well as French President Emmanuel Macron and EU chief Charles Michel reached an agreement on the mission at an October 6 meeting in Prague. It came three weeks after large-scale border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces left more than 300 soldiers dead.
French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said late on Tuesday that the 40 or so civilian monitors deployed by the EU to the Armenian side of the border have “really limited the risk of escalation.”
“This presence should continue as long as it is needed,” Colonna told the French parliament. “This is our belief. This is also … the desire of the Armenians.”
Tensions along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and the “line of contact” in and around Nagorno-Karabakh increased late last month and early this month, with the two sides regularly accusing each other of violating the ceasefire. Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan described the situation there as “extremely tense” last week.
Colonna acknowledged that tensions in the conflict zone are running high. But she blamed that on “the absence of credibility of security guarantees which Russia claimed to have offered the region.”
On October 12, Macron accused Moscow of inciting Azerbaijan to attack Armenia in a bid to destabilize the South Caucasus. The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the French president’s accusation as “egregious” and “absurd.”