Baku refers to several tiny enclaves inside Armenia which were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by the Armenian army in the early 1990s. For its part, the Azerbaijani side seized at the time a bigger Armenian enclave comprising the village of Artsvashen as well as large swathes of agricultural land belonging to this and several other border communities of Armenia.
Azerbaijan claims that it had never occupied any Armenian territory. It also rejects the idea of using Soviet-era military maps to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This delimitation mechanism is backed by Armenia as well as the European Union.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev demanded the “de-occupation” of those villages in a phone call with European Council President Charles Michel last month. His demands came amid lingering fears in Yerevan that Azerbaijan may invade Armenia after regaining control over Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Armenia has not handed over to Azerbaijan the eight Azerbaijani villages that are still under occupation,” the Foreign Ministry in Baku said on Tuesday in a statement on the third anniversary of a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the six-week war in Karabakh.
Gevorg Papoyan, a parliament deputy and leading member of Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party, responded by saying that Yerevan has never pledged to unilaterally give those enclaves back to Azerbaijan. Echoing statements by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, he said that the Armenian government can only discuss mutual troop withdrawals or territorial swaps.
“But as a result of that process, Armenia’s total area must remain 29,800 square kilometers,” Papoyan told reporters. “This must be enshrined in an [Armenian-Azerbaijani] peace treaty. So we need to sign the kind of peace treaty that could not create problems or leave the possibility of a new war.”
Armenian opposition leaders have repeatedly condemned Pashinian’s stated readiness to consider the return of the enclaves, saying that they all are adjacent to highways leading to Armenia’s strategic Syunik province and Georgia. One of them, Tigran Abrahamian, claimed on Wednesday that the Azerbaijani demands are the result of Pashinian’s “unilateral commitments.”