- FROM AFP NEWS
With energy shortages worsening and store shelves going bare, concern grows over a deepening humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan blocked aid convoys to the breakaway region.
"Our road of life has been closed, we have no electricity," Liana Atayan, a 47-year-old resident of the region's main city, Stepanakert, told AFP.
"There is no gas, no food, what kind of situation is that?" said Atayan. "Our children, our elderly people and pregnant women don't have access to fruit and vegetables."
Locals reported new shortages of food and medicine after the International Committee of the Red Cross said Azerbaijan blocked access to Karabakh last week.
Azerbaijan's Armenian-populated region of Karabakh has been at the centre of a decades-long territorial dispute between the Caucasus arch-foes.
Since last December Karabakh has been hit by a humanitarian crisis when Azerbaijani activists blocked a key road to protest illegal mining.
Azerbaijan insisted that civilian transport and aid convoys could go through the Lachin corridor unimpeded.
But on Monday the Armenian branch of the Red Cross said it could no longer bring humanitarian supplies to the disputed territory including medicines and transportation of ill patients had been also suspended.
Nelly Khachatryan, 62, said the city had not received any humanitarian aid for days.
"Things are very difficult," she said.
Slavik Seinyan, a taxi driver, said he could no longer work and support his family due to shortages of fuel.
"What should I do? Tell me what I should do," he said. "I am 70 years old."
Authorities have introduced electricity rationing, and 28-year-old Ruzanna Tadevosyan fears the situation will deteriorate further.
"There is a possibility that we will spend even more hours without electricity," she said.
"We have no gas and caring for children in these conditions is very complicated."
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has claimed the blockade was aimed at forcing ethnic Armenians to leave Karabakh, describing it as part of Azerbaijan's "policy of ethnic cleansing."
The two former Soviet republics have fought two wars for control of Karabakh, in the 1990s and again in 2020.
Six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 ended with a Russian-sponsored ceasefire that saw Armenia cede swathes of territories it had controlled for decades.
There have been frequent clashes at the two countries' shared border despite talks between Baku and Yerevan under the mediation from the European Union and United States.
Marietta Avanesyan, 65, said she saw "no end in sight" for the mounting troubles of the Karabakh people.
"How can we overcome these difficulties?"
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