“If Baku's concern is to ensure reliable cargo transportation to and from Nakhichevan, that issue is resolved,” Pashinian said in a fresh article penned for the official Armenpress news agency. “All that remains is for Azerbaijan to say yes.”
“It is unclear why these proposals are being rejected by Azerbaijan,” he wrote. “I hope not for creating a false pretext for escalation.”
The Armenian government made the still unpublicized proposals last fall in response to Baku’s continuing demands for an extraterritorial land corridor that would pass through a key Armenian region. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said last month that they have no “practical significance.” Pashinian’s political allies claimed that this reaction does not amount to an official rejection of the proposals.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev continued, meanwhile, to accuse Yerevan of not complying with a relevant provision of a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement that stopped the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The clause commits Armenia to opening rail and road links between Nakhichevan and the rest of Azerbaijan.
The Armenian government insists that it does not stipulate that people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan must be exempt from Armenian border checks. The government has said that it can only agree to “simplified procedures” for Armenian-Azerbaijani border crossings and cargo transit.
Pashinian repeated these arguments in his article. He did not elaborate on “some simplifications of border crossing procedures” proposed to the Azerbaijani side.
In another article published by Armenpress on February 10, Pashinian claimed that Baku may be “trying to form the basis” for another military aggression against Armenia. Aliyev implicitly threatened such military action in January, branding Armenia as a “fascist” state and complaining about Yerevan’s reluctance to open the land corridor. Pashinian responded at the time by signaling readiness to make more concessions to Baku.
Alen Simonian, the Armenian parliament speaker and a leading member of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, also spoke on Tuesday of the risk of an Azerbaijani attack.
“We must always do everything to make sure there are no reasons or pretexts for such escalation,” Simonian told journalists.
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that Pashinian’s appeasement policy is only encouraging Aliyev to make more demands on Yerevan. According to Tigran Abrahamian, an opposition parliamentarian, this is why Baku is in no rush to accept the proposals cited by Pashinian.
“Azerbaijan is trying to take advantage of ongoing changes in the world order and to understand what opportunities it and its ally Turkey can get under these new rules of the game,” said Abrahamian. “It may also be waiting for the emergence of a more favorable environment that would help it get much more than the concessions that are offered by Armenia.”