Pashinian’s press office said that he raised with Putin the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh caused by the blockade and “stressed the importance of necessary steps by Russia to overcome it.”
“In this context, activities of the Russian peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh were discussed,” the office added without elaborating.
The Kremlin made no explicit mention of the blockade in its readout of the call which it said took place “at the initiative of the Armenian side.”
“The current situation around Nagorno-Karabakh was discussed with an emphasis on the importance of consistent implementation of the entire set of trilateral agreements between the leaders of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan,” it said.
Earlier, Pashinian and other Armenian officials accused the Russian peacekeepers of doing little to unblock the sole road connecting Karabakh to Armenia. Some of those officials also claimed that Russia is using the blockade to try to force Armenia to join the “union state” of Russia and Belarus. Moscow angrily denied the claims.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called on Baku to end the blockade when he spoke with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov by phone on January 17. Lavrov predicted the following day that commercial traffic through the corridor will resume soon.
Azerbaijani government-backed protesters have since continued to keep the Lachin corridor closed and demand that Baku be given access to “illegal” copper mines in Karabakh. The Azerbaijani government remains adamant in backing their actions despite facing pressure from the United States and the European Union as well.
Armenia’s relations with Russia have also soured because of the European Union’s decision to send a new team of monitors to Armenia’s volatile border with Azerbaijan.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said last week that the two-year monitoring mission will be part of EU attempts to “push back Russia's mediation efforts at any cost.” It also chided Yerevan for agreeing to the EU deployment and refusing a similar mission offered by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).