The young men were taken into Azerbaijani custody as they and dozens of other Karabakh Armenians travelled to Armenia in a convoy of vehicles escorted by Russian peacekeepers. Karabakh’s leadership and the Armenian government strongly condemned the arrests.
Azerbaijan’s Office of the Prosecutor-General said late on Monday that the three detainees are members of a Karabakh football team that had “disrespected” the Azerbaijani national flag in a 2021 video posted on social media.
In what it called an act of “humanism,” the office said that they will not be prosecuted on relevant criminal charges and will be placed instead under a ten-day administrative arrest. They will be freed and “deported from Azerbaijan” after completing the short jail term, it said.
Arayik Harutiunian, the Karabakh president, met with the detainees’ parents early on Tuesday. They said he assured them that their sons will be released and brought to Stepanakert very soon. Harutiunian’s office did not clarify who will repatriate Alen Sargsian, Vahe Hovsepian and Levon Grigorian and when.
In Yerevan, meanwhile, dozens of mostly Karabakh-born citizens demonstrated outside the Russian Embassy for the second consecutive day to demand that Moscow ensure the immediate release of the three men in line with its peacekeeping mandate. They were furious with the fact that Russian peacekeeping soldiers escorting the convoy did not stop Azerbaijani security officers from arresting the men.
“As we can see, such cases keep happening and we see no mechanisms for preventing them,” one of the protesters, Arega Hovsepian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Hovsepian pointed to the July arrest at the Lachin checkpoint of another Karabakh Armenian man, Vagif Khachatrian, who was being evacuated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Armenia for urgent medical treatment. The 68-year-old was taken Baku to stand trial on charges of killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani residents in 1991. Karabakh’s leadership rejected the “false” accusations.
The ICRC has organized such medical evacuations on a regular basis since Azerbaijan halted last December commercial traffic through the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia. Last week, Baku also allowed other categories of Karabakh’s population, notably university students and holders of Russian passports, to travel to Armenia.
No Karabakh residents were transported to Armenia through the Lachin corridor on Tuesday. Gegham Stepanian, Karabakh’s human rights ombudsman, said that both the Russian peacekeepers and the ICRC must refrain from organizing more such trips in the absence of Azerbaijani “security guarantees.”