IN IMAGES, IN PICTURES – For nearly two weeks, Azerbaijani activists have been blocking the Lachin Corridor, the only road that connects the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
Several thousand demonstrators gathered on Sunday, December 25 in Stepanakert, the main city of Nagorny Kabarakh, against the blocking of a vital axis to Armenia, noted an AFP journalist.
For nearly two weeks, Azerbaijani activists have blocked the Lachin Corridor, the only road that connects the mountainous region of Nagorny Karabakh to Armenia, saying they are protesting against illegal mines in the region. Yerevan accuses Baku of wanting to provoke a “humanitarian crisis“, which Azerbaijan rejects, assuring that it is always possible to circulate on this axis.
Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed in the early 1990s, during the breakup of the USSR, over control of Nagorny Karabakh, an Armenian-majority enclave that seceded from Azerbaijan.
This first conflict, which claimed 30,000 lives, ended in an Armenian victory. But Azerbaijan took its revenge in a second war that claimed the lives of 6,500 people in the fall of 2020 and allowed Baku to retake many territories.
On Saturday, the people of Stepanakert expressed concern about a situation deemed “severe“. “It is the only road that connects the region to the rest of the worldDonara Gabrielyan, a teacher, told AFP. “We reach the rest of the world through Armenia. The situation is very serious“, she added, while Vyacheslav, a pensioner, explained that it is about “the road of life“. This new resurgence of tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan has raised serious concerns on the international scene.
On Sunday morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that a three-way meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is trying to mediate, and Azerbaijani leaders Ilham Aliev and Armenian Nikol Pashinyan was not not planned at the beginning of the week on the sidelines of a regional summit in Saint Petersburg (north-west of Russia). On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron called on his Azerbaijani counterpart to allow the “free circulationbetween the separatist enclave and Armenia.
Armenia also accuses of inaction the Russian peacekeepers deployed there since November 2020, after the six-week war between Baku and Yerevan, while Moscow is monopolized by its military intervention in Ukraine. The head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov, for his part, called for appeasement between the two countries during a meeting in Moscow on Friday with his Azerbaijani counterpart, boycotted by Yerevan. “It is essential to lower the voltage as soon as possible“Sergei Lavrov had declared during a press conference.