Karabakh authorities said on Monday that they have run out of scarce fuel reserved from buses and minibuses. They already suspended earlier this month public transport in Stepanakert and curtailed bus services with other Karabakh towns and villages for the same reason.
The vast majority of vehicles in Karabakh are powered by natural gas which was supplied from Armenia before being pressurized and sold at local gas stations. Azerbaijan disrupted a steady flow of the gas shortly after blocking commercial traffic through the Lachin corridor last December. A gas pipeline feeding Karabakh was most recently unblocked for just a few hours on July 8.
Baku tightened the blockade on June 15, banning emergency relief supplies that were carried out by Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee of the Red Cross through the sole road connecting Karabakh to Armenia and the outside world. The move aggravated the shortages of food, medicine and other essential items experienced by the region’s population.
The fuel crisis not only disrupted travel but also complicated food supplies inside Karabakh. Local farmers now have trouble taking their produce to markets, and there are growing problems with the delivery of flour to bakeries.
“It is very difficult to get the flour here,” Lyudmila Mezhlumian, a bakery worker in Stepanakert, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan warned last week that Karabakh is now “on the verge of starvation” as he urged stronger international pressure on Azerbaijan. The United States, the European Union and Russia have repeatedly called for an end to the Azerbaijani blockade. Baku has dismissed their appeals.
The humanitarian crisis is also affecting Karabakh’s struggling healthcare system. The head of an intensive care unit at Karabakh’s main children’s hospital said on Monday that it is increasingly hard for the parents of seriously ill children living outside Stepanakert to transport them to the facility.
Baku has frequently banned evacuations of Karabakh patients to hospitals in Armenia carried out by only the ICRC during the blockade. It most recently unblocked them last week after requiring those patients to be checked by Azerbaijani medical personnel while passing through its checkpoint in the Lachin corridor. The Karabakh premier, Gurgen Nersisian, said at the weekend that Red Cross officials “somehow managed to convince” the Azerbaijani side not to film “that process.”
Karabakh’s main security service said on Monday that local residents are receiving Russian-language phone calls offering to help them safely “go to Armenia via Baku.” It urged them to ignore the Azerbaijani “disinformation.”