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The EU and US have urged Azerbaijan to provide help teams extra entry to ethnic Armenians, as tens of hundreds flee the battle zone.
“The EU harassed the necessity for transparency and entry for worldwide humanitarian and human rights actors and for extra element on Baku’s imaginative and prescient for Karabakh Armenians’ future in Azerbaijan,” the EU Council president, Charles Michel, mentioned in an announcement on Tuesday (26 September).
Michel spoke after internet hosting talks between Armenian safety council chief Armen Grigoryan and Azeri presidential aide Hikmet Hajiyev in Brussels.
The assembly included aides to French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a novel format.
They mentioned the “pressing wants of the native inhabitants” within the Nagorno-Karabakh area — an ethnic Armenian exclave in Azerbaijan, which Azerbaijan reconquered final week as Russian peacekeepers stood idly by.
The EU-led talks additionally spoke of the likelihood that Armenian and Azeri leaders would meet on the sidelines of an EU summit in Granada, Spain, on 5 October.
The EU has unarmed civilian displays on the Armenian facet of the border however no troopers within the area.
The European Fee had additionally cozied as much as Baku for extra fuel gross sales to the EU within the run-up to the newest hostilities, prompting sharp rebukes by MEPs.
On the US facet, Samantha Energy, the pinnacle of the US Company for Worldwide Growth, talking in Yerevan additionally on Tuesday urged Azerbaijan to “keep the ceasefire and take concrete steps to guard the rights of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
“It’s completely crucial that impartial displays in addition to humanitarian organisations get entry to the individuals in Nagorno-Karabakh,” she mentioned, in line with Reuters.
“We have now heard very troubling stories of violence towards civilians. On the identical time given the chaos right here and the trauma, the gathering of testimonies … of the individuals who have come throughout is one thing that’s simply starting,” she added.
Greater than 19,000 ethnic Armenians out of 120,000 or so who lived there have already fled Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia correct in latest days.
And the exodus is rising, with media stories of a 100km-long visitors jam of refugee automobiles snaking towards the Armenian border.
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev had promised them full rights as Azeri residents in the event that they stayed, however few appeared to imagine him, given his lengthy file of anti-Armenian aggression and propaganda.
Chatting with MEPs final week, the EU international service’s Russia director Luc Devigne, mentioned Russian peacekeepers had waved by Azeri forces in the course of the transient fight operations as a result of Russia needed to punish Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan for making overtures to the West.
And the ensuing refugee movement risked destabilising Pashinyan’s pro-Western authorities, giving Russia the chance to put in a pro-Russian determine in his place, Devigne warned.
Pashinyan doubled down on his pivot to the West on Sunday, nonetheless.
“The programs of exterior safety by which Armenia is concerned are ineffective on the subject of the safety of our safety and Armenia’s nationwide pursuits,” he mentioned, referring to Armenia’s former reliance on Russia as a safety guarantor beneath the auspices of the Collective Safety Treaty Group.
Armenia also needs to be a part of the Worldwide Prison Court docket (ICC), he added, making Armenia a possible no-go zone for Russian president Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant because of his battle on Ukraine.
In reply, the Russian international ministry mentioned Monday Pashinyan was making an attempt to distract individuals from his alleged “failures in home and international coverage by shifting the blame to Moscow”.
He had “shied away from working in rhythm with Russia and Azerbaijan and as a substitute had run to the West”, it added.
Pashinyan got here to energy in a peaceable revolution in 2018 that resembled the so-called Rose, Orange, and Tulip uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan some 20 years in the past, which the Kremlin has all the time blamed on Western intrigue.
The Armenian chief has already confronted mass protests in Yerevan over his Nagorno-Karabakh defeat.
However Russia mentioned: “The top of the Armenian authorities must be nicely conscious that Moscow doesn’t become involved in such issues [fomenting opposition protests] — not like the West which is fairly adept at organising ‘color revolutions’.”
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