Pashinian visited on Monday two of those villages in Armenia’s northern Tavush province, Voskepar and Kirants, that are adjacent to four deserted settlements occupied by the Armenian army in 1991-1992. He signaled last week his readiness to accept Baku’s demands for an unconditional Armenian withdrawal from those contested areas.
Pashinian’s office released on Tuesday more excerpts from his comments made during meetings with local residents seriously concerned about the security of their families and communities. In a video publicized by the office, he essentially confirmed that in exchange for the Armenian withdrawal Azerbaijan would not liberate any Armenian territory occupied by it in the same area in the early 1990s.
“Our policy is that we must not allow the outbreak of a war,” Pashinian told the villagers. “This is also a reason why we decided to opt for adjusting the border of Armenia at this section.”
“In this situation, it’s better for us to stand on our border and put forward demands for them to leave our territory than to stand beyond our border while knowing that they will use it as a target,” he said.
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian meets with residents of Voskepar, March 18, 2024.
He claimed that failure to meet the Azerbaijani demands would “mean a war will break out at the end of the week.”
Many of the locals were unconvinced by that explanation. More of them said on Tuesday that they would lose access to their land, have trouble communicating with the rest of the country and be far more vulnerable from Azerbaijani armed attacks.
“[Pashinian] said, ‘Here is my advice to you: we must settle this without fighting; or else, we will lose,’” one Voskepar resident told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“The [old] border is only 80 meters from the village school. Five of its 55 students are from my household. How could I let them go there?” said the man.
“I won’t let my grandchildren go to school,” agreed another, female resident. “I will immediately get them out. If there is no school, there is also no village.”
“I didn’t go to the meeting [with Pashinian,] but everyone who did came away from it very unhappy and disappointed,” said another woman.
The territorial concessions planned by Pashinian have been strongly condemned by the Armenian opposition. Opposition leaders say they would not only have serious consequences for the security of the affected communities but also the country as a whole.
“Fulfilling Azerbaijan's incessant demands by continuously threatening our people with war will not only not prevent Azerbaijan from making new demands but will also create fertile ground for new aggressive actions by the latter,” the main opposition Hayastan alliance said in a statement released on Tuesday. It said that Pashinian will commit a “grave crime against the state” if he goes ahead with his plans.
The ruined villages claimed by Baku are strategically located along one of the two main Armenian highways leading to Georgia as well as the pipeline supplying Russian natural gas to Armenia via Georgia. Pashinian said on March 12 that the local sections of that infrastructure must be rerouted “so that they pass through Armenia’s de jure territory.”
Armenia - Seyran Ohanian, a leader of the main opposition Hayastan alliance, speaks at a news conference, Yerevan, January 19, 2023.
Seyran Ohanian, a former defense minister leading Hayastan's parliamentary group, countered that building such bypasses would be very difficult and time-consuming.
Ohanian said the handover of the border areas would also breach the integrity of the Armenian army’s border defense fortifications in Tavush reinforced over the last three decades. Azerbaijani troops would pose a more serious security threat to this and another northern Armenian province, Lori, he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Pashinian had already ordered unilateral Armenian troop withdrawals from contested border areas in the southeastern Syunik province in the wake of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. That did not stop Azerbaijani forces from attacking Syunik and making territorial gains there in 2021 and 2022.