Vagif Khachatrian, a 68-year-old resident of the Karabakh village of Patara, was among patients escorted by the ICRC to Armenian hospitals for urgent treatment. He was detained at an Azerbaijani checkpoint in the Lachin corridor in what Karabakh’s leadership and the Armenian government condemned as a gross violation of international law.
Azerbaijani authorities said later in the day that Khachatrian was taken to Baku to stand trial on charges of killing and deporting Karabakh’s ethnic Azerbaijani residents in December 1991, at the start of the first Armenian-Azerbaijani war. They claimed that he was indicted on these charges in 2013.
A senior Karabakh official, Artak Beglarian, rejected the “false” accusations. He insisted that like many other Karabakh Armenian men, Khachatrian “defended his homeland” during the 1991-1994 and did not commit war crimes.
“He was neither a commander nor a deputy commander. He was a driver,” Khachatrian’s daughter Tsovinar, who accompanied him during his aborted trip to Armenia, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. She said her father was due to undergo a heart surgery in Yerevan.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry condemned Khachatrian’s arrest as a “blatant violation of international humanitarian law” and “war crime.” “It is aimed at completely disrupting the ICRC’s activities in Nagorno-Karabakh at a time when Azerbaijan is keeping the Lachin corridor closed and impeding the entry of other international organizations to Nagorno-Karabakh,” it said in a statement.
Khachatrian is the first Karabakh patient arrested by the Azerbaijani authorities during the medical evacuations organized by the ICRC after Baku halted last December commercial traffic through the only road connecting Karabakh to Armenia. The Red Cross did not immediately react to his detention.
There was also no immediate reaction from Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in Karabakh. It is not clear whether they tried to prevent the man’s arrest.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly suspended the medical evacuations. On June 15, it also banned the ICRC and the Russian peacekeepers from sending limited amounts of humanitarian aid to Karabakh, aggravating the shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other essential items in the Armenian-populated region.
The worsening humanitarian crisis there led the United States, the European Union and Russia to renew their calls for the lifting of the Azerbaijani blockade. Baku continued to reject such appeals this week.
Gurgen Nersisian, the Karabakh premier, on Saturday also blamed Armenia for the crisis and Khachatrian’s “kidnapping” in particular, saying that this was made possible by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s May 2023 pledge to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh.
Armenian opposition leaders have likewise claimed that the far-reaching concession made by Pashinian only emboldened Baku to tighten the screws on the Karabakh Armenians.