The supplies are carried out from Armenia through a pipeline passing through Azerbaijani-controlled areas in and around Karabakh. They were blocked on Tuesday the day after a large group of Azerbaijanis began the road blockade.
Ruben Vardanyan, the Karabakh premier, said Baku stopped blocking the gas supplies “without any preconditions and without us making concessions.”
“This is really a victory for us because we have demonstrated that we are strong and will not succumb to panic,” Vardanyan said in a video address.
Gas flows to households in Stepanakert and other parts of the region resumed later in the day. Lines of cars running on liquefied or pressurized natural gas formed outside local filling stations which all but stopped selling fuel on Wednesday due to fuel rationing introduced by the authorities.
“They said that there will be gas today,” one taxi driver told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “So we’ll probably resume our work in the afternoon.”
The authorities seemed in no rush to reopen Karabakh kindergartens, schools and colleges using gas for heating purposes.
The United States and the European Union were quick to express serious concern over the gas supply disruption.
“If deliberate, it’s unacceptable to target the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh,” a U.S. State Department spokesman said late on Tuesday.
The Western powers also urged Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin corridor connecting Karabakh and Armenia. Baku showed no signs of heeding those appeals on Friday.
Russia, which has peacekeeping troops stationed in Karabakh, also called for renewed traffic through the corridor on Thursday. It said that the peacekeepers have been “actively working on de-escalating the situation” and expressed hope that the vital road will be unblocked “in the very near future.”
In his morning address, Vardanyan did not exclude that the road will be unblocked already on Friday. Davit Babayan, Karabakh’s acting foreign minister stranded in Yerevan, similarly spoke of a “possibility” of the imminent lifting of the blockade. But he would not say when that could happen.
“We have to realize that such incidents, such terrorizing actions may recur,” Babayan told reporters in the Armenian capital.
Groups of Azerbaijanis continued to occupy a road section adjacent to the Azerbaijani-controlled Karabakh town of Shushi on ostensibly environmental grounds. They are demanding that the Azerbaijani government be allowed to inspect two metal mines in Karabakh.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov reportedly complained on Thursday that the protesters’ demands have still not been met.
With no end in sight to the blockade, Karabakh increasingly grappled with shortages of some foodstuffs, drugs and hygiene products import from or through Armenia.
“We are selling limited quantities of food -- one kilogram of sugar, two kilos of flour per person -- so that everyone can buy them,” said one grocery store worker in Stepanakert.