Armenian troops withdrew from those areas more than a month after a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The withdrawal sparked angry protests by Syunik residents concerned about the security of their communities.
Nearly one year later, Azerbaijan seized full control of a 21-kilometer section of the main highway that connected the provincial towns of Goris and Kapan. It was part of Armenia’s sole overland transport link with neighboring Iran. The Azerbaijani move made the highway section off limits to Armenian, Iranian and other vehicles, forcing the Armenian government to hastily build a 70-kilometer bypass road in Syunik.
Around the same time, the government allowed several opposition parliamentarians to see a copy of a document that mandated the Armenian troop withdrawal. According to one of those lawmakers, Gegham Manukian, the memorandum signed only by the then defense ministers of Armenia and Russia listed no legal grounds for the handover.
Armenia - Opposition leader Gegham Manukian speaks to RFE/RL, January 12, 2023.
Manukian insisted on Monday that he believes the handover was illegal because it was carried out “without any delimitation and demarcation” of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. This is why, he said, Pashinian’s administration withheld any information about the memorandum for almost a year.
“I’m sure that Armenia’s future authorities, law-enforcement system will deal with that in the near future,” said Manukian.
Ayvazian, who was appointed as foreign minister just days after the November 2020 truce, said that the document was kept secret from him and the Foreign Ministry as a whole during his six-month tenure.
“When [word of] it emerged, I appealed, through the prime minister, to the Defense Ministry to share that document with us,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service “But I didn’t manage to familiarize myself with the document during my tenure.”
“It’s not just the Foreign Ministry that wasn’t aware. The Armenian people were deceived,” Manukian charged in this regard.
The opposition leader also said that the December 2020 document did not call for Azerbaijani control over the Goris-Kapan road.
Armenia -- A section of the Goris-Kapan road in the Syunik province, September 3, 2018.
“According that memorandum, Armenian and Azerbaijani border guards were due to be deployed on either side of the road and it should not have been controlled by any party,” he said.
The Armenian Defense Ministry likewise stated in December 2020 that the disputed road section will be controlled by Russian troops. This seems to explain why Pashinian accused Baku of breaching trilateral understandings when traffic through it was first disrupted in August 2021.
Speaking in the Armenian parliament in October 2021, Pashinian admitted personally ordering the controversial troop withdrawal. He claimed that failure to do so would have led Azerbaijan to invade Syunik.
Pashinian gave the same explanation for his decision earlier this year to cede to Azerbaijan four smaller but equally important borders areas in Armenia’s northern Tavush province. The decision sparked protests by residents of local border communities. They escalated into massive anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan in May and June.
The protest leader, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, has pledged to resume his campaign for Pashinian’s resignation this fall. A recently created association of retired senior diplomats, including Ayvazian, aligned itself with Galstanian’s opposition-backed movement ahead of the Yerevan rallies.