Armenia’s PM warns Azerbaijan could start war over disputed border villages

Armenia could face war by ‘end of the week’ if it does not return four Azerbaijani villages, PM Pashinyan says.

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said his country could face a war with neighbouring Azerbaijan if it does not compromise and return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s.

In the video published on Tuesday, Pashinyan was speaking at a meeting with residents in northern Armenia’s Tavush region, close to a string of deserted Azerbaijani villages that Armenia has controlled since the early 1990s.

The four villages, which have been uninhabited for more than 30 years, are of strategic value to Armenia as they straddle the main road between Yerevan and the Georgian border.

Azerbaijan has said the return of its lands, which also include several tiny enclaves entirely surrounded by Armenian territory, is a necessary condition for a peace deal to end three decades of conflict over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan’s forces retook last September.

Pashinyan told locals on Monday, in the video clip that was circulated by his government, that failure to compromise over the villages could lead to war with Azerbaijan “by the end of the week”, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

“Now we can leave here, let’s go and tell [Azerbaijan] that no, we are not going to do anything. This means that at the end of the week a war will begin,” TASS quoted him as saying.

Armenia suffered a major defeat in September when Azerbaijan’s forces retook Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive, prompting almost all of that region’s estimated 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.

Though Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised internationally as Azerbaijani territory, the region’s ethnic