Armenian Prime Minister: "It is very likely" that a new war with Azerbaijan will break out
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, on Friday, in an interview with Agence France-Presse, that it is "very likely" that a new war will break out between his country and Azerbaijan, which are fighting over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Pashinyan warned that "unless a peace treaty is concluded and ratified by the parliaments of the two countries, it is of course very likely that a (new) war will break out."
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars to control Nagorno-Karabakh, the last of which was in 2020, which resulted in an Armenian defeat and Azerbaijan achieving field gains, and ended with a fragile ceasefire.
Tensions re-escalated in early July after Azerbaijan closed, under various pretexts, traffic through the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
The Azerbaijani blockade has caused a serious humanitarian crisis within the enclave, which is mainly inhabited by Armenians, with shortages of food and medicine and frequent power outages.
"This is not a genocide in preparation, but a genocide in progress," Pashinyan said, accusing the Azerbaijani army of making Nagorno-Karabakh a "isolated region".
With the latest round of peace talks held on July 15 in Brussels failing to produce a breakthrough, Pashinyan called on the West and Russia to put more pressure on Baku to lift the blockade.
"According to the logic of some Western circles, Russia does not meet all our expectations because it does not fulfill its obligations, but Russia tells us the same thing about the West," he said.
According to Nikol Pashinyan, the negotiations are hampered by "Azerbaijan's aggressive rhetoric and hate speech against Armenians," and accused Baku of carrying out a "policy of ethnic cleansing."
The first war revolved around the fate of the enclave when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, and it claimed the lives of 30,000 people, while the last war in 2020 left about 6,500 dead on both sides.