In a weekend speech, Pashinian pointed to Baku’s continuing reluctance to recognize his country’s borders certified by Soviet maps and renewed demands for an extraterritorial corridor to the Nakhichevan exclave that would pass through a strategic Armenian region.
“I consider recent statements from Baku to be a serious blow to the peace process. The first impression is that … Azerbaijan is trying to generate territorial claims against Armenia, which is unacceptable,” he told members of his Civil Contract party at a meeting held in the eastern town of Gavar.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his senior aides have said in recent weeks that Baku and Yerevan should sign a bilateral peace treaty before agreeing on how to delimit the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Aliyev made clear on January 10 that Baku continues to reject Yerevan’s insistence on using the most recent Soviet military maps printed in the 1970s as a basis for the border delimitation.
In that regard, Aliyev again accused Armenia of occupying “eight Azerbaijani villages.” He referred to several small 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. It also occupied other Armenian border areas following the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Earlier this month Baku renewed its demands for the so-called “Zangezur corridor.” Aliyev insisted that people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan through Armenia’s Syunik province must be exempt from Armenian border checks. Another senior Azerbaijani official said on January 5 that Armenia has an “obligation” to do so under the terms of the Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Pashinian countered that it contains no provisions calling for an extraterritorial corridor to Nakhichevan. He also charged that Azerbaijan and Russia effectively scrapped the truce accord with Baku’s September 19-20 military offensive in Karabakh that restored Azerbaijani control over the region and forced its population to flee to Armenia.
“There is no way that document can no longer be valid for two parties [that signed it] but continue to be valid for the third party,” he said.
Meanwhile, Armenian opposition leaders on Monday portrayed the latest verbal exchanges between Baku and Yerevan as another vindication of their claims that the peace treaty touted Pashinian’s administration would not be a safeguard against another Armenian-Azerbaijani war. They said Pashinian’s stance is only encouraging Aliyev to seek further Armenian concessions even after the recapture of Karabakh.
“If those two key provisions -- the border delimitation and the unblocking of regional transport links -- are left out of the treaty, it will not eliminate the existing threats [to Armenia’s security] in any way,” said Tigran Abrahamian of the Pativ Unem bloc. “That could lead to an escalation of the situation, including the outbreak of fighting, at any moment.”
“If Nikol Pashinian had normal structures that would assess the military-political situation in a proper and timely way, they would quickly see that Azerbaijan's offer of peace is a deception,” said Seyran Ohanian, the parliamentary leader of another opposition bloc, Hayastan.