“We call on Baku to take steps to completely unblock the [Lachin] corridor for humanitarian purposes and not to hold Karabakh’s population hostage to political disagreements with Yerevan,” said Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.
Zakharova said Moscow keeps trying to restore vital supplies of food, medicine and other essential items to Karabakh.
Baku stopped on June 15 the movement through the corridor of humanitarian convoys organized by the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Karabakh and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The move followed a shootout near an Azerbaijani checkpoint controversially set up there in late April.
Armenia said its border guards opened fire to stop Azerbaijani servicemen manning the checkpoint from placing an Azerbaijani flag on adjacent Armenian territory. Azerbaijan insisted, however, that they did not cross into Armenia.
Videos of the incident suggest that the Azerbaijanis were escorted by Russian soldiers as they crossed a bridge in order to hoist the flag, even though Moscow too had criticized the Azerbaijani checkpoint as a violation of the 2020 ceasefire agreement. The Armenian Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Yerevan on June 16 to express “strong discontent” with the Russian peacekeepers’ actions.
“Accusations directed at the Russian peacekeepers are absolutely groundless and unfounded,” Zakharova told a news briefing in Moscow. “We would recommend that media rhetoric on this score be toned down. The peacekeepers are … doing a good job of stabilizing the situation, maintaining the ceasefire regime in their zone of responsibility.”
She blamed the shootout on the fact that the Armenian-Azerbaijani border has not been delimited and demarcated.
The Azerbaijani side had already halted commercial traffic through the Lachin corridor last December. The further tightening of its blockade aggravated the resulting humanitarian crisis in Karabakh. The Armenian-populated region is now struggling with worsening shortages of food and medicine which were supplied, in limited quantities, by the Russian peacekeepers until June 15.
Karabakh’s leadership charged on Wednesday that Baku’s actions amount to a “war crime.” It demanded that the international community take “coercive measures” to end the blockade.
“Azerbaijan has elevated to a new level its systematic policy of ethnic cleansing of Artsakh and the destruction of its people,” read a statement released by the foreign ministry in Stepanakert.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian raised the “illegal blockade” with a group of members of the European Parliament at a meeting in Yerevan held on Tuesday. Pashinian renewed his calls for the dispatch of an international fact-finding mission to Karabakh and the Lachin corridor.
On Wednesday, the visiting parliamentarians joined members of a European Union monitoring mission in touring an Armenian border area adjacent to the corridor. They discussed the security situation there and in Armenia’s Syunik province as a whole with Robert Ghukasian, the provincial governor.
“I reaffirm the European Parliament’s position that the blockade of the Lachin corridor is illegal and must end,” the head of the delegation, Nathalie Loiseau, told reporters afterwards.