Edmon Marukian, a former ambassador-at-large now leading the Bright Armenia Party, said on Wednesday that this is the only way of preventing Azerbaijan from invading Armenia in a bid to open a land corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Paragraph 9 of the ceasefire agreement that commits Yerevan to opening transport links between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan through Armenia’s strategic Syunik province. Baku has repeatedly accused Yerevan of not complying with it.
“Armenia was a party to the November 9 [ 2020 agreement] and we saw what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Grigorian said, commenting on Marukian’s calls made in an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“The November 9 [agreement] also has at least eight other articles and we saw what happened to those eight articles,” he said, clearly alluding Azerbaijan’s September 2023 assault on Karabakh. “How can anyone, whether they are a politician or not, fail to accept the reality of what happened to those eight articles and say that we must return to it for the sake of a single article? We can return and repeat the same path.”
“The de facto reality is that none of the other articles of the November 9 statement exists now,” added the pro-Western official.
Grigorian declined to say why Yerevan has not withdrawn its signature from the truce accord. “That is a matter for another discussion,” he said.
Paragraph 9 also stipulates that Russian border guards will “control” the movement of people, vehicles and goods through Syunik. The Armenian government, which is increasingly at loggerheads with Moscow, says this does not mean that they can have any “physical presence” along the would-be transit routes. The government has essentially sought since 2022 to exclude Russian involvement in its peace talks with Baku.
Another opposition leader, former President Robert Kocharian, insisted on Monday that the 2020 agreement represents the only realistic chance of enabling Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population to return to the region recaptured by Baku in September 2023. Marukian similarly seemed to suggest that the Russians are in a position to pressure Baku to agree to their repatriation and self-rule.