Baku renewed those demands earlier this month after reporting that another Azerbaijani civilian hit a landmine in the Karabakh conflict zone and was injured as a result. It called for international pressure on Yerevan.
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) said late on Thursday that it has located eight more minefields in recent interviews with Karabakh Armenian military personnel who fled the region along its entire civilian population following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive. Their maps will be passed on to the Azerbaijani side “in the coming days,” the NSS said in a statement.
The statement came the day after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian visited the NSS headquarters in Yerevan and met with the security agency’s leadership. Pashinian signaled last week his readiness to make more concessions to Azerbaijan. On January 13, he accused Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of laying claim to Armenian territory.
Responding to the NSS statement, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said that Armenia is still not serious about helping Azerbaijan clear the territories recaptured by it during the 2020 war and last September of landmines.
“This step cannot be assessed as a confidence-building measure,” it said. “Azerbaijan expects Armenia to present concrete maps of all mined territories.”
The ministry claimed that minefield maps provided by the Armenian side earlier are very inaccurate.
Yerevan shared that information with Baku in 2021 in return for the release of dozens of Armenian prisoners of war. The NSS statement suggests that it is not linking the fresh data on minefields with the repatriation of at least 23 other Armenian captives remaining in Azerbaijan.
They include eight former political and military leaders of Karabakh detained following the Azerbaijani assault. Azerbaijani courts on Thursday extended their pre-trial detention by another four months. The country’s prosecutor-general said on Friday that they must stand trial for their “crimes against the Azerbaijani people.”
The Armenian government strongly condemned the arrests and urged the international community to help free the Karabakh leaders. But it does not seem to be raising the issue in ongoing contacts with Baku on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
Siranush Sahakian, an Armenian human rights lawyer dealing with the captives, suggested that their release is not a top priority for Pashinian’s administration now. She said Baku is using the issue to try to clinch more concessions from Yerevan.
“I share the view that there were going to be concession regardless of the issue of the captives,” Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “It’s just that the issue is being used for selling those concessions to the public.”
Pashinian’s political opponents say that Armenia is not gaining anything in exchange for those concessions and that this appeasement policy will not lead to a lasting peace between the two South Caucasus nations.