Russia rounded on Armenia on Wednesday for criticizing its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who accused Yerevan of torpedoing a Russian-brokered agreement to give Azerbaijan a transport corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
“This is yet another example of official Yerevan’s line of blaming others, in this case Russia, for its own mistakes and strategic miscalculations,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, charged, underscoring heightened tensions between the two increasingly estranged allies.
Zakharova cited Paragraph 9 of a November 2020 ceasefire deal that stopped the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. It says that Yerevan will “guarantee the security of transport links” between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan and also stipulates that Russian border guards will “control” the movement of people, vehicles and goods through Armenia’s Syunik province.
Zakharova said that a Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani task force dealing with the matter worked out the practical modalities of that arrangement at its last meeting held in Moscow in June 2023. She claimed that they were not put into practice because of the “intransigence of the Armenian side.”
Read also
In particular, she said, Yerevan demanded “contrary to Paragraph 9” that Russian border guards also deal with the transit of Armenian goods through Azerbaijani territory. It walked away from the deal “at the behest of the West,” added Zakharova.
Like Lavrov, Zakharova did not comment on other provisions of the truce accord that committed Azerbaijan to halting its military operations and led to the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh and the Lachin corridor connecting the region to Armenia. The peacekeepers did not intervene when Baku blocked the corridor in November 2022 and launched in September 2023 a large-scale military offensive that forced Karabakh’s entire population to flee to Armenia.
Armenia’s government regards the Azerbaijani offensive as a gross violation of the ceasefire. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said in January that Russia’s failure to prevent or thwart it means that Baku and Moscow effectively scrapped the 2020 deal brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Baku wants people and goods moving to and from Nakhichevan through Syunik to be exempt from Armenian border controls. Yerevan has rejected these demands, at least until now. It has said that the two South Caucasus states should have only conventional transport links guaranteeing their full control over all transit routes passing through their respective territories.
Neighboring Iran also opposes the extraterritorial land corridor sought by Baku. Its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed Tehran’s stance when he met with Pashinian on July 30. Syunik is the only Armenian province bordering Iran.