January 26, 2023 - 17:16 AMT
Pashinyan: Baku continuously using "tool of gas pressure" against Karabakh

Azerbaijan is continuously using "the tool of gas pressure" against the people of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, January 26, referencing Baku's practice of closing the pipeline delivering gas from Armenia to Artsakh.

"As if blocking the Lachin Corridor was not enough for Azerbaijan, it also closes the gas pipeline feeding Nagorno-Karabakh, then opens it by 10 percent, then closes it again, then opens it by, say, 25 percent, and so on. Azerbaijan also continuously uses the tool of gas pressure, which is obviously reprehensible," Pashinyan said.

"The next reason for the non-working of kindergartens is the lack of prescribed food for children. This, in turn, is connected with the closure of the Lachin Corridor."

According to him, the road of life of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Lachin Corridor, which was defined by the tripartite declaration of November 9, 2020 and written guarantees were given by the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation for the uninterrupted operation of which, has been closed for 46 days.

"And as I mentioned above, normal life in Nagorno-Karabakh has been disrupted for 46 days, and the humanitarian crisis is deepening in full swing," he said.

"In Nagorno-Karabakh, frequent power outages take place, because Azerbaijan has also disrupted the work of power lines supplying Nagorno-Karabakh, and the population is supplied with electricity only at the expense of the production capacity of local power plants, which is not enough. Basic necessities are supplied to the population through a voucher system.

"As I said before, with all this, the government of Azerbaijan pursues one goal: to break the will of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homeland. Moreover, according to the information we have, Baku's plan is as follows: to bring the economic and psychological pressure in Nagorno-Karabakh to a certain culmination point, after that to open the corridor for a few days with the expectation that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will leave their homes en masse, to close the corridor again and then open again for a few days and so on until the last Armenian leaves Nagorno-Karabakh. This is, of course, a blatant policy of ethnic cleansing. And I must record that if until now the international community was skeptical about our alarms about Azerbaijan's intentions to subject the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to ethnic cleansing, now we already see that this perception is slowly but steadily growing stronger among the international community."

Since December 12, the sole road connecting Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia - the Lachin Corridor - has been blocked by self-described Azerbaijani environmentalists. Karabakh residents have reported food and fuel shortages, while hospital patients don't have access to essential medicines, with only a handful allowed transfer to facilities in Armenia proper.