The defendants include three former Karabakh presidents and Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born billionaire and philanthropist who briefly served as Karabakh premier in 2022-2023. Also standing trial are eight other Karabakh Armenians who were likewise captured by Azerbaijan during and after its September 2023 military offensive that forced Karabakh’s entire population to flee to Armenia.
Neither Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s office nor the Armenian Foreign Ministry has issued any official statements on the start of hearings at an Azerbaijani military court denounced by Armenian human rights activists as a travesty of justice.
Vahagn Aleksanian, a deputy chairman of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, confirmed that Yerevan’s silence, decried by the Armenian opposition, is deliberate.
“If you think that a couple of tough statements made for consolation would have contributed to the release of our captives, you are wrong,” he told reporters. “Additional publicity would only hamper this process [of trying to have all Armenian prisoners freed by Azerbaijan.]”
“They can’t make such immoral statements and present their doing nothing as helping the prisoners,” countered Armen Rustamian, a senior lawmaker from the main opposition Hayastan alliance.
Rustamian said that Pashinian’s government is simply afraid of angering Baku in line with its appeasement policy in the conflict with Azerbaijan.
“For the sake of that, [the Armenian authorities] are sacrificing everything: our identity, our territory and these persons [tried in Baku] who are bargaining chips for them in this big game,” he charged.
The Armenian National Congress (HAK), an opposition party led by former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, similarly condemned Pashinian for his “obvious and complete indifference to the fate of the captured leaders of Artsakh.”
“Armenia is obliged to publicly raise its voice in their defense, to make the issue of their release one of the necessary conditions on the agenda of Armenian-Azerbaijani reconciliation and peace,” the HAK said in a weekend statement.
Aleksanian, the ruling party representative, also implied that some of the former Karabakh leaders held in Azerbaijan, notably Arayik Harutiunian, have only themselves to blame for their captivity.
“I wish our Nagorno-Karabakh colleagues had listened to us and gone to Sofia to negotiate [with Azerbaijan before the September 2023 offensive] instead of listening to Armenian opposition forces,” he said.
Tigran Abrahamian, another opposition lawmaker, said such statements make mockery of the Pashinian government’s pledges to strive for the release of all Armenian prisoners remaining in Azerbaijan.
Pashinian was already accused by his domestic critics last fall of helping Baku legitimize Vardanyan’s continuing imprisonment with his scathing comments about the tycoon. Speaking during a news conference last August, the Armenian premier wondered who had told Vardanyan to renounce Russian citizenship and move to Karabakh in 2022 and “for what purpose.”
He seemed to echo Azerbaijani leaders’ earlier claims that Vardanyan was dispatched to Karabakh by Moscow to serve Russian interests there. Vardanyan hit back at Pashinian in a September statement issued via his family.
Prior to their capture, Vardanyan and the Karabakh ex-presidents strongly criticized Pashinian for publicly recognizing Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh.