Yerevan's urgent appeal to UN Security Council also claims Azeris are causing a humanitarian crisis with blockade on the city of Stepanakert
Armenia has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting after accusing Azerbaijan of engineering a genocide and warning of war.
Its foreign ministry said that the city of Stepanakert is running out of food, medicine and fuel after a two-month-long blockade by Azerbaijan.
“The situation has already resulted in a recorded increase of mortality,” it said in a statement.
“Today, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh are on the verge of a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe.”
Stepanakert has a population of 120,000 people and is the biggest city in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed mountainous region that Azerbaijan regained control of after defeating Armenia in a war in 2020.
Since the 2020 war, Stepanakert’s primary link with mainland Armenia has been along a road called the Lechin corridor. From mid-December, though, Azerbaijan has blocked this route, first by encouraging alleged environmental demonstrators to protest and then, from mid-June, building a military checkpoint.
Not even aid convoys are now allowed through to Stepanakert, which senior UN officials said this week was now a “humanitarian emergency”.
“By lifting the blockade, the authorities can alleviate the suffering of thousands of people,” they said.
Photos from Stepanakert show bare shelves in shops, closed petrol stations and queues of people waiting to buy bread. Locally grown vegetables are still available at markets but their prices have soared.
Azerbaijan has said that it was forced to erect the military checkpoint and ban aid vehicles from reaching Stepanakert to stop smuggling. It has also offered access to Stepanarkert through another circuitous and far more complicated route that passes through the town of Agdam, which it controls.
Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian Prime Minister, has accused the Kremlin of failing its peacekeeper duties by ignoring Azerbaijani aggression because it is distracted by its war in Ukraine.
Azerbaijan is turning the screw on Stepanarkert, analysts have said, because it is flush with cash from new gas contracts with the EU, buoyed by security deals with Turkey and Israel and energised after its victory in the 2020 war.
Roughly 7,000 people died in the 2020 war. There are still regular small-scale skirmishes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces which kill several soldiers each month.
