The government insisted that Armenian border guards opened fire on June 15 to stop Azerbaijani servicemen manning a checkpoint set up in the corridor from placing an Azerbaijani flag on adjacent Armenian territory. Baku maintains that they did not cross into Armenia.
Videos of the incident suggest that the Azerbaijanis were escorted by Russian soldiers as they crossed a bridge over the Hakari river in a bid to hoist the flag. The Armenian Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Yerevan on June 16 to express “strong discontent” with the Russian peacekeepers’ actions.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, on Wednesday defended the peacekeepers and rejected the Armenian criticism as “absolutely groundless.” She said the incident resulted from the “absence of a delimited Armenian-Azerbaijani border.”
The Armenian Foreign Ministry dismissed that argument, saying that Zakharova echoed Baku’s regular justifications of its “aggressive actions against Armenia’s borders.”
“It is not clear why the Russian peacekeepers participated in that Azerbaijani operation given that both the purpose and even the scene of the operation were clearly outside the scope of the peacekeepers' functions and their zone of responsibility,” the ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, said in written comments.
Badalian said the Hakari bridge marks the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in that area. Instead of “looking for excuses,” Moscow should help to ensure the conflicting parties’ full compliance with a Russian-brokered agreement that stopped the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, added the official.
Russian peacekeepers stand guard in the town of Lachin (Berdzor), December 1, 2020.
The ceasefire agreement placed the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia under the control of the Russian peacekeeping contingent and committed Azerbaijan to guaranteeing safe passage through it. Azerbaijan blocked commercial traffic there last December before setting up the checkpoint in April in what the Armenian side denounced as a further gross violation of the agreement.
Right after the June 15 incident, Baku also blocked relief supplies to and medical evacuations from Karabakh, aggravating the humanitarian crisis in the Armenian-populated region. Zakharova called for the lifting of the blockade, saying that Baku should not “hold Karabakh’s population hostage to political disagreements with Yerevan.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other Armenian officials have repeatedly accused the Russians of not doing enough to unblock the vital road. They also complained about a lack of broader Russian support for Armenia in the conflict with Azerbaijan.