Artak Beglarian, an advisor to Nagorno-Karabakh’s de facto premier, said on Friday that the incident happened at 5:55 p.m. on August 17 and that Karabakh specialists tried to approach the area together with Russian peacekeepers to restore the cable but were not allowed to proceed by Azerbaijani forces.
He said negotiations between the peacekeepers and the Azerbaijani side to allow Karabakh specialists to access the site and repair the cable continued on Friday morning.
Azerbaijani authorities did not comment on the reported incident immediately.
“I don’t find it to be a coincidence that this new crime took place after the UN Security Council meeting and literally five minutes before the start of an online press conference on the subject of the genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Beglarian said.
He said that because of the disruption Nagorno-Karabakh-based participants of the press conference could join the two other speakers only with a 45-minute delay and had to use an unstable connection line.
“Despite the Azerbaijani efforts, the press conference did take place and 130 people from 27 countries participated in the event,” Beglarian said.
The official said that only a very limited volume of internet was accessible in Nagorno-Karabakh through an unstable radio connection as of Friday morning, adding that it was “continuously under Azerbaijani jamming” too.
Nagorno-Karabakh has lived in conditions of an effective blockade imposed by Azerbaijan since last December when traffic along the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, was blocked by a group of Azerbaijani protesters calling themselves environmental activists.
In April, claiming that Armenians were using the Lachin corridor for transporting military cargoes, Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint at its entrance from Armenia despite protests from Stepanakert and Yerevan that called the roadblock illegal, citing a Moscow-brokered 2020 ceasefire agreement under which the vital road should remain under the control of Russian peacekeepers deployed in the region.
Citing “various types of contraband”, Baku further tightened the effective blockade in the middle of June by banning all humanitarian supplies through the corridor. Shortages of food, medicines, fuel and other basic products in the region became particularly severe after that.
Amid rationing of food in the region authorities in Stepanakert reported the first death from hunger among Karabakh residents earlier this week.
The United Nations Security Council met in New York at Armenia’s request on August 16 to discuss the current humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia charge that Azerbaijan’s blockade amounts to a policy of ethnic cleansings and expect a resolution from the UN Security Council to unblock the Lachin corridor.
Baku denies blockading Nagorno-Karabakh or carrying out any policy of ethnic cleansings in relation to the region’s Armenian population. It offers supplies to Karabakh Armenians through an alternative route, but Stepanakert rejects the offer.