More than three years after the handover to Azerbaijan of contested border areas, including an interstate road section, the Armenian Foreign Ministry has confirmed that a relevant memorandum had been signed between the defense ministers of Armenia and Russia.
Armenian troops withdrew from certain areas along Armenia’s Syunik province in December 2020, more than a month after a Russian-brokered ceasefire put an end to a 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.
The memorandum signed between Armenia and Russia on the controversial withdrawal has never been published.
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While confirming its existence, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the document is not at its disposal.
An unofficial version of the document appeared on the Internet about two months after it was signed. At that time different government officials sought to deny that any such document was signed, with some even claiming that the one being circulated online was a fake.
“It is merely a text compiled by a computer on A4 paper, in which whatever is said is presented as 100 percent truth,” pro-government lawmaker Sisak Gabrielyan said then.
Around the time Azerbaijan took control of the road section, the government allowed several opposition parliamentarians to see a copy of the 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.
Manukian insisted late last month 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, Prime Minister Nikol 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,” Manukian said.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service in July Ara Ayvazian, who was appointed 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.
The Armenian Defense Ministry stated in December 2020 that the disputed Goris-Kapan road section would 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.