They pitched the tents late on Tuesday near a Russian military checkpoint separating the conflicting sides and spent the following night there after two trucks carrying 40 tons of flour provided by the government-linked Azerbaijan Red Crescent reached Aghdam.
“We don’t want to get anything from our enemy,” said Hamlet Apresian, the mayor of Askeran, a Karabakh town close to Aghdam, who joined the protesters at the blocked road section.
“We will never accept any aid from them,” Hasmik Andrian, a resident of the nearby village of Khramort, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. She said Azerbaijani troops have regularly opened fire at local farmers trying to harvest wheat.
Karabakh’s leaders reaffirmed support for this stance, saying that the proposed aid is part of Azerbaijani efforts to deflect international attention from the blockade and regain full control over the Armenian-populated region. They insisted that Baku comply instead with the Russian-brokered 2020 ceasefire that commits it to guaranteeing unfettered commercial and humanitarian traffic through the Lachin corridor.
“There is a clear decision to keep that road [to Aghdam] closed,” Davit Ishkhanian, the Karabakh parliament speaker, told reporters in Stepanakert. He visited the Karabakh protesters camped out on that road later in the day.
Baku pushed for an alternative, Azerbaijani-controlled supply line for Karabakh after tightening the blockade in mid-June. Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee of the Red Cross have since been unable to ship any food, medicine or other basic necessities to Karabakh residents.
A senior aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told the BBC on Wednesday that renewed humanitarian traffic through Karabakh’s blocked land link with Armenia is conditional on the opening of the Aghdam road. Aliyev reportedly underlined this condition on Tuesday in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron whose government is increasingly critical of the blockade.
The European Union, the United States and Russia have also repeatedly called for the immediate lifting of the blockade. The Azerbaijani side has dismissed their appeals. It has also ignored a February order by the International Court of Justice to “take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles, and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions.”
The Karabakh Armenians remain adamant in rejecting the Aghdam route despite struggling with growing shortages of food. The Karabakh authorities admitted on Tuesday that the region is running out of flour. They said that from now on each family in Stepanakert and other Karabakh towns will be allowed to buy only one loaf of bread a day.