Arman Tatoyan, a former human rights ombudsman leading the recently established Wings of Unity movement, demonstrated satellite images to back up his claims. They purportedly showed new Azerbaijani army positions set up near two Armenian border towns: Vartenis and Jermuk.
“The Azerbaijani government continues to take, like salami, control of our country, our sovereign territories, and then invade and cut them into pieces again,” he told a news conference. “This is the price this government has declared for peace.”
Defense Minister Suren Papikian dismissed Tatoyan’s claims as lies when he spoke in the Armenian parliament later in the day. Sisak Gabrielian, a parliament deputy from the ruling Civil Contract party, also denied them.
“If this was the case, you would have heard about it before Tatoyan,” Gabrielian told journalists, arguing that local residents would have been the first to report such territorial gains.
According to the Armenian government, Azerbaijan continues to occupy more than 200 square kilometers of Armenian territory mostly seized by its troops during border clashes in 2021 and 2022. Baku denies that they crossed into Armenia during that fighting.
Tatoyan, whose opposition group plans to run in the June 6 parliamentary elections, said the Azerbaijani military further fortified its positions in those border areas last summer in the run-up to an Azerbaijani summit in Washington hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump. He said this is another indication that it does not intend to withdraw from them anytime soon.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly said that Armenia will eventually regain control of its territory as a result of a planned delimitation and demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. He has ruled out using military force for that purpose.
Only a small section of the long border has been demarcated to date, with Pashinian unilaterally handing over several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan in April-May 2024. The move sparked massive anti-government protests in Yerevan.