2023-04-28 09:38:35
The visit does not please Moscow. Russia on Thursday (April 27th) accused France and the United States of hampering its mediation efforts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna met with the leaders of the two enemy countries to encourage them to finally overcome their territorial disputes.
The head of French diplomacy began by going to Azerbaijan – relations between this country and France are strained. She spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes, longer than expected, with its president, Ilham Aliyev. “Committing with determination to the path of peace means renouncing the use of force or the threat of the use of force”, a dit Mme Colonna, Baku. She then went to Armenia, a historic ally of Paris, to meet Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian for more than an hour and a half.
The visit takes place in a particularly tense context. Baku announced on April 23 that it had installed a checkpoint at the entrance to the Lachin corridor, the only road linking Armenia to the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. This is the first time such a measure has been taken since the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the fall of 2020, which ended in a landslide victory for Baku.
This checkpoint will have little immediate impact, as the road has already been blocked since December 2022 by a group of activists supported by the Azerbaijani government. But it represents a new coup by the Azerbaijani authorities to tighten their grip around Nagorno-Karabakh, where tens of thousands of Armenians live.
“False pretenses”
Baku says it acted ” in response “ to a similar decision taken the day before by Yerevan and “to prevent the illegal transport of manpower, weapons and mines from the territory of Armenia for the illegal formations of Armenian bandits in the territory of Azerbaijan”. The Armenian authorities have denounced a “a new challenge” and a decision “unacceptable”, taken under “false pretexts without foundation”. They called for help from Russia, which was supposed to ensure security on this road axis.
“No one except Russia has the right to control the corridor,” hammered Mr. Pashinian before receiving Mr.me Colonna, assuring that Baku’s objective was “the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh”. For its part, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry assured that the checkpoint “will be set up in interaction with the Russian peacekeeping force” deployed as part of the ceasefire signed in November 2020, under Russian mediation, to end the forty-four-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
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