Azerbaijan has dismissed Armenia’s recent decision to provide additional maps of minefields in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, responding to Azerbaijani requests for such information.
This development comes after Azerbaijan renewed its demands earlier this month, following reports of another civilian being injured by a landmine in the Karabakh conflict zone. Baku has called for international pressure on Yerevan in this regard.
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) announced late on Thursday that it has identified eight more minefields through recent interviews with Karabakh Armenian military personnel who fled the region along with its civilian population after Azerbaijan’s military offensive in September 2023. The NSS stated that these maps will be shared with Azerbaijan “in the coming days.”
The NSS statement follows Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s visit to the NSS headquarters in Yerevan, where he met with the security agency’s leadership. Pashinyan had previously signaled his readiness to make further concessions to Azerbaijan. However, on January 13, he accused Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of laying claim to Armenian territory.
In response to the NSS statement, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry stated that Armenia is not serious about assisting Azerbaijan in clearing the territories recaptured by Azerbaijan during the 2020 war and last September of landmines. The ministry emphasized that Azerbaijan expects Armenia to provide precise maps of all mined territories, claiming that the minefield maps provided earlier by Armenia are highly inaccurate.
Armenia had previously shared minefield information with Azerbaijan in 2021, in exchange for the release of dozens of Armenian prisoners of war. However, the NSS statement suggests that the recent data on minefields is not linked to the repatriation of at least 23 other Armenian captives still held in Azerbaijan.
The Armenian government has strongly condemned the arrests of these captives and called on the international community to help secure their release. Nevertheless, it appears that this issue is not a priority in the ongoing discussions with Azerbaijan regarding an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
Siranush Sahakyan, an Armenian human rights lawyer involved in the captive issue, suggested that the release of the captives may not be a top priority for Pashinyan’s administration at the moment. She believes that Baku is leveraging the issue to extract further concessions from Yerevan.
Critics of Pashinyan’s government argue that Armenia is not gaining anything substantial in exchange for these concessions and that this policy of appeasement will not lead to a lasting peace between the two South Caucasus nations.
