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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Tuesday that he was “convinced” that Russia would come to the rescue if the country were directly attacked, amid hostilities with Azerbaijan in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
“I am convinced that, if the situation demands it, Russia will fulfill its obligations” in an existing military alliance between the two countries, Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview with AFP in Yerevan, the Armenian capital.
The Armenian prime minister also said that the hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh were provoked by Turkey’s “active engagement” in support of Azerbaijan, denouncing a “terrorist war against a people fighting for their freedom.”
“Without Turkey’s active engagement, this war would not have started. While it is true that the Azerbaijani authorities have actively promoted belligerent rhetoric for the past 15 years, the decision to start the war was motivated by Turkey’s full support,” Nikol Pashinyan said, according to Agerpres.
The Kremlin denounces the deterioration of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh
The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is “deteriorating”, the Kremlin denounced on Tuesday, the tenth day of fighting in this separatist region that Armenians and Azeris face, calling the killing of civilians “unacceptable”.
“The situation continues to deteriorate, people continue to die, which is totally unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, reiterating that the parties have an obligation to stop shooting and come to the negotiating table. “.
Armenians and Azeris continued to fight for control of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region on Tuesday, while Turkey called on the international community to support Azerbaijan, despite calls for an armistice and civilian casualties.
On the tenth day of the fight, neither camp seems to have recorded a decisive advantage.
Baku and Yerevan have been accused in recent days of intentionally intensifying their bombardments against inhabited urban areas, especially the separatist capital Stepanakert and Azerbaijan’s second city, Grandja.
Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mainly by Armenian Christians, declared its independence from Azerbaijan, a Shiite Muslim country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a secession that led to a war that killed some 30,000 people in the early 1990s. Nagorno-Karabakh front was nearly frozen after an armistice ended in 1994, despite regular fighting.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, whose oil-rich country has spent heavily on modern weapons, vowed to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, ruling out an armistice without an Armenian military withdrawal from the region and without “apologies” from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pasinian.
The death toll since the start of the conflict remains highly debatable. Azerbaijan, which has reported no casualties among its soldiers, cites the deaths of 46 civilians, while Karabah claims that 240 of its soldiers and 19 civilians have lost their lives. Instead, Baku and Yerevan claim to have killed 2,300 and 3,500 enemy soldiers, respectively, and blamed each other for the hostilities.
Publisher: GC
