It comes a day after Putin warned Armenia against seeking EU membership and alluded to the “Ukrainian scenario.” Yerevan historically has strong ties to Moscow but has pivoted to the West in recent years.
It comes a day after Putin warned Armenia against seeking EU membership and alluded to the “Ukrainian scenario.” Yerevan historically has strong ties to Moscow but has pivoted to the West in recent years.
Both sides did significants amount of ethnic cleansing in the first war to the magnitude of hundreds of thousands of people, and it was horrible from both sides. But two wrongs do not make a right. Azerbaijan “wanting the territory back” as just reparation of the first war would have a lot more credence if it didn’t consistently deny Armenia’s nationhood and call it “Western Azerbaijan”, and if it didn’t basically lay siege to an entire region for 9 months.
You aren’t going around calling Armenia a genocider nation, though, are you?
All the Western Azerbaijan stuff is tit for tat fodder Aliyev says to boost appeal with nationalists. Azeris get incensed when all the formerly occupied regions and NK get referred to as “Artsakh”, and its capital as Stepanakert after Stepan Shaumian whose forces murdered thousands of Azeris, or the cases of Armenian media calling Azerbaijan a fake nation younger than Coca-Cola that should go back to Mongolia or whatever. So because they find that sort of stuff humiliating, nationalists get a fuzzy feeling when Aliyev claps back and returns that by calling their cities and regions by Azeri names from before they were cleansed out of Armenia which he’ll sometimes do to shore up nationalist support. But in actuality Azerbaijan has been angling to get the borders demarcated and settled with an agreement that allows them to transit to their exclave as settling those uncertainties would bring an insane amount of money in which would be impossible if they actually attempted to conquer Armenia.
With respect to the siege, the context of it was that originally the ceasefire agreement stated the following:
Azerbaijan re-opened the Lachin corridor in a flash. Armenia however did not do the same for Azerbaijan to access its exclave and kept on dragging its feet on the topic. So Azerbaijan started doing more and more tactics to pressure Armenia into reciprocity like by having the supposed environmental protests. Armenia did not budge at all and eventually Azerbaijan determined that if Armenia wasn’t going to provide the access that the ceasefire called for then neither would it and so blocked the Lachin corridor, BUT they did have an alternative ready of supplies via Azerbaijan’s Aghdam road. The problem is that the NK Armenians absolutely loathed the idea of relying on Azerbaijan in any way. Here is an Armenian website’s article about the protests blocking Azeri supplies from coming on the Aghdam road, which they called a “road of death”. Another Armenian website here showing concrete barriers installed to prevent the wrong kind of aid from getting to them. It’s kind of a weird siege where people are setting up barriers to prevent aid from getting to their own people. Then again these were supporters of Ruben Vardanyan who was a stooge installed as Minister of State of NK a month before he got his Russian citizenship personally annulled by Putin so he could afterwards become a citizen of the state he was now a leading politician of.