Azerbaijani government-controlled media outlets revealed the extraordinary charge in their coverage of Thursday’s court hearing in Vardanyan’s ongoing trial in Baku. They reported no evidence in support of it. They cited an Azerbaijani prosecutor as likening the alleged plot to the assassinations by Armenian activists of masterminds and perpetrators of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
Mesrop Arakelian, a leader of an Armenian opposition party linked to Vardanyan, said on Friday that this accusation is just as “laughable” as the others.
“It is obvious that all of Azerbaijan's accusations are from the genre of fantasy,” Arakelian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Vardanyan, who held the second-highest post in Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership from November 2022 to February 2023, was arrested at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor in September 2023 as he fled the region along with tens of thousands of its ordinary residents displaced by an Azerbaijani offensive. He was initially charged with “financing terrorism,” illegally entering Karabakh and supplying its armed forces with military equipment.
Vardanyan said last month he is now facing as many as 42 charges. In a statement circulated via his Yerevan-based family, he rejected them as politically motivated and accused Azerbaijani authorities of attributing false testimony to him.
An Azerbaijani military court began the simultaneous trials of Vardanyan and 15 Karabakh Armenians on January 17. The defendants include three former Karabakh presidents -- Arayik Harutiunian, Bako Sahakian and Arkadi Ghukasian. They too were captured by Azerbaijan during or shortly after its September 2023 military offensive that forced Karabakh’s entire population to flee to Armenia and restored Azerbaijani control over the region.
In contrast with an outpouring of support for the captives voiced by prominent public figures in Armenia and its worldwide Diaspora, the Armenian government pointedly declined to condemn the trials. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian claimed later in January that an explicit condemnation would only harm them. Pashinian’s critics insisted that he is simply afraid of angering Baku.
Vardanyan’s American lawyer, Jared Genser, said, meanwhile, that the Armenian government is doing little to try to secure the release of his client and the other former Karabakh leaders.
“It doesn’t seem from what I’ve heard that bringing Ruben or others home is an especially high priority [for Pashinian’s government,]” Genser told the Armenian Report.
Critics already accused Pashinian last fall of helping Baku legitimize Vardanyan’s continuing imprisonment with his scathing comments about the tycoon. Speaking during a news conference last August, the Armenian premier wondered who had told Vardanyan to renounce Russian citizenship and move to Karabakh in 2022 and “for what purpose.”
Pashinian seemed to echo Azerbaijani leaders’ earlier claims that Vardanyan was dispatched to Karabakh by Moscow to serve Russian interests there. Vardanyan hit back at him in a September statement issued via his family.