Karabakh imports food items such as cooking oil, dairies and rice and virtually all of its medicines. These and other imports ground to a halt on Monday after large groups of Azerbaijanis blocked the sole road linking Karabakh to Armenia.
The crisis was compounded by the disruption on Tuesday of gas supplies from Armenia to Karabakh carried out through a pipeline passing through Azerbaijani-controlled territory.
Some shopkeepers in Stepanakert said that they are running out of key groceries because of panic buying.
“People are buying up things like oil, sugar, buckwheat,” one of them, Irina Manasian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “It’s been like that since yesterday.”
People working at local drugstores reported a similar problem. They said Stepanakert residents are buying large quantities of medication for fever and high blood pressure as well as painkillers.
“Everything is running out,” said one of them. “Demand is very, very strong.”
Also, buying fuel was all but impossible in and outside Stepanakert. In accordance with a “saving regime” announced by the Karabakh government on Wednesday, local filling stations sold gasoline and liquefied gas only to ambulances, public buses and other vehicles authorized by authorities.
The authorities also shut down all schools, colleges and kindergartens that use natural gas for heating purposes. For the same reason, Karabakh’s main maternity hospital had to switch to a more expensive and less efficient electrical heating mode.
“It’s very cold in the hospital right now,” said Pavlina Gabrielian, a young woman who gave birth there earlier this week.
Other Karabakh hospitals decided to cancel non-urgent surgeries to save energy and medicines. They remained unable on Thursday to transport some of their gravely ill patients to Yerevan for further treatment.
The Karabakh premier, Ruben Vardanyan, held another emergency meeting with local officials in the morning. An official statement on the meeting said they discussed, among other things, “measures that will help to minimize a deficit of electricity.”
The officials also briefed Vardanyan on Karabakh’s current stockpiles of foodstuffs, drugs and other essential items, added the statement. They assured him that “there are enough flour stocks in the republic.”
All Karabakh bakeries using gas had to stop their work. According to the statement, the Karabakh officials discussed the possibility of reactivating them with “alternative fuel.”