Armenia counts its losses from Ukraine fall-out
VLADIMIR SHAHINYAN is a proud Armenian but he says he has been betrayed.
The 37-year-old is one of the losers in a deal encouraged by the US and the EU for Armenia to hand control of four border villages to arch-enemy Azerbaijan.
Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, sees the deal as a chance for peace but Mr Shahinyan sees it as a sell-out that has created a personal crisis. Under the redrawn border, his car repair garage will be moved inside Azerbaijan and out of his reach.
“I don’t know what I will do when I lose the workshop. I have two children that I need to provide for. I feel psychologically pressured,” he said as he waited for permission to drive through a police roadblock in this mountainous corner of north-east Armenia.
Russia’s war in Ukraine overshadows flashpoints between Western democracy and Kremlininspired autocracy in the South Caucasus but analysts say these conflicts are critical for building influence in the strategically important region that connects Asia and Europe. In Georgia, police wearing balaclavas have in recent weeks attacked crowds demonstrating against a Kremlininspired law that undermines Western-backed non-governmental organisations and here, in this lush border zone a three-hour drive from Yerevan, Armenian officials are conceding land to Kremlin-backed Azerbaijan after several military defeats since 2020.
Armenia’s relations with the Kremlin have soured over Russia’s failure to protect it despite security guarantees amid its war on Ukraine.
In September, Azerbaijan completed its capture of the disputed region of Nagorno-karabakh after Russian peacekeepers were ordered to stand aside moments before an assault some believe was approved by the Kremlin.
Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, was seen laughing and joking with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin days after Russia withdrew 2,000 peacekeeping soldiers from Nagornokarabakh because “they were no longer needed”.
Tigran Grigoryan, head of the regional centre for democracy and security think tank in Yerevan, said that Azerbaijan’s military superiority, often financed by oil and gas sales to Europe, the Kremlin’s preoccupation with its war in Ukraine and Azerbaijan’s importance for Russian trade routes to Iran encouraged Mr Aliyev to complete the capture of Nagorno-karabakh despite a peace deal imposed by Russia after a 2020 war. “Azerbaijan is one of the big winners of the war in Ukraine and, aside from Ukraine, Armenia is one of the biggest losers,” he said.
The demarcation process that Mr Pashinyan is now trying to sell to Armenians is supposed to fix the border, twisted by conflict and ethnic cleansing by both sides since the late 1980s, but most Armenians said they felt humiliated and don’t believe that Azerbaijan will keep to its side of the bargain to give up Armenian territory that it has captured.
In the past week, police in Yerevan have arrested dozens of people protesting against the land handover. Levon, an off-duty taxi driver smoking a cigarette on a street in the Armenian capital, rolled his eyes when asked about the deal and explained the deep-rooted distrust.
“You give them this much, and then they take this much,” he said, first holding his thumb and finger close together and then moving his hands apart.
And this remote border zone is currently the focus of the Armenian fury. Here, Mr Aliyev claims sovereignty over four villages, including part of the village of Kirants where Mr Shahinyan, the mechanic, lives. The village will be split after the border is shifted by more than a mile.
“My house will be right next to the border. I don’t know how my children will be able to live there as they know their uncle was killed by Azeris in the war in 2020,” said Mr Shahinyan.
The villages were part of Azerbaijan during the Soviet era, and have Azerbaijani names as well as Armenian names, but have been controlled by Armenia since the 1990s.
Most were abandoned although several people living in Kirants told
The Telegraph that they would lose their house and land with the border demarcation.
On Friday, a few dozen police manned a blockade of the road leading to the villages because the Armenian army was demining surrounding fields ahead of the handover.
Bagrat Galstanyan, a local archbishop, has been campaigning against the border transfer and had travelled to see the roadblock. “This is all about geopolitics. Russia is playing dirty games,” he said.
“They have just handed over everything, the next thing to happen is ethnic cleansing,” said Artsrun, after gesticulating at the police and then returning to his battered car.
Talk of ethnic cleansing in Armenia is poignant. Millions of Armenians were forced out of Turkey in 1915, trekking to modern-day Armenia, Lebanon and Syria for sanctuary. Many died on the journey. In September, after Azerbaijan completed its capture of Nagorno-karabakh, 100,000 ethnic Armenians also fled from Stepanakert, their regional capital, which effectively ethnically cleansed the region.
Mr Aliyev, who has been in power since 2003 and won an election with 93 per cent of the vote this year has gloried in his military victories, which include capturing sovereign Armenian territory overlooking a popular spa town in 2022.