The European Union Mission in Armenia (EUMA) has denied Azerbaijani claims of an Armenian military buildup on their border.
EUMA’s statement came after Baku accused Yerevan and Stepanakert of ramping up their military presence along their borders with Azerbaijan, as well as of building of Armenian military infrastructure within Nagorno-Karabakh.
EUMA is a civilian monitoring mission deployed on the Armenian side of the Armenia–Azerbaijan border.
‘In recent days, there has been a large concentration of weapons, military equipment and personnel along the state border in order to carry out another military adventure’, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry claimed.
On Monday, Armenia’s Foreign Ministry dismissed Azerbaijan’s statements as ‘fake’ and accused it of attempting to drive attention away from its blockade of the Lachin Corridor.
‘It is also evident that one of the objectives of Azerbaijan’s disinformation campaign is to divert the international community’s attention from the escalating humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is intensifying day by day, and from its steps to implement ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh through provoking a humanitarian catastrophe’, read the statement.
While Nagorno-Karabakh has been under Azerbaijani blockade since December, the humanitarian crisis in the region deepened further in mid-June when Azerbaijan barred the Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh from using the Lachin Corridor to supply the region.
Tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan have also been growing, with the two countries continuously accusing each other of ceasefire violations.
Upon Armenia’s request, the UN Security Council has scheduled an emergency meeting for Wedesday to discuss the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Azerbaijan has criticised Armenia’s appeal to the Security Council, accusing it of ‘deliberately and intentionally [obstructing] all the efforts made through international partners to find a balanced, law-based, and reasonable solution on the ground’.
In an Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry statement, Baku argued that ‘what Armenia cynically seeks’ from the UN Security Council was within reach had it and Stepanakert agreed to supplying Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijani-held territory in Aghdam in late July.
Last week, former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Ocampo has called on the Security Council to adopt a resolution on the situation in the blockaded region to allow the tribunal to investigate Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for genocidal intentions.
[Read more: Former ICC prosecutor accuses Azerbaijan of ‘genocide’ in Nagorno-Karabakh]
However, despite international condemnation, Azerbaijan continues to deny that Nagorno-Karabakh is under blockade, and maintains that the region is not facing a humanitarian crisis.
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.