Stratfor report says Armenia should return Azerbaijani land still under occupation When will Yerevan turn words into deeds?

"Fear is likely to drive Yerevan to further concede to Baku's demands," the Stratfor think tank said in a situation report. "Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Armenia risks war with Azerbaijan if Yerevan does not return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s as part of border delimitation talks. He said that failure to compromise could mean war with Azerbaijan by the end of the week," the report said.

In this regard, it should be noted that Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said his country could face a war with neighbouring Azerbaijan if it does not compromise and return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s. A video of the dialogue with the Tavush residents was released by the Armenian government's press service. “Now we can leave here, let’s go and tell [Azerbaijan] that no, we are not going to do anything. This means that at the end of the week, a war will begin,” he said.

"I know what will happen at the end of this war," Pashinyan added, explaining that after the armed conflict, the locals will ask him why he, who had information about the imminent outbreak of hostilities, did not warn them. Stratfor's report cites Pashinyan's comments. Pashinyan's statement regarding the possibility of an imminent war is an exaggeration but indicates Armenia's fear of Azerbaijani military action, the reports said. "This fear will likely push Yerevan to continue conceding to Baku's demands," Stratfor noted.

The Stratfor report also points out that it is unclear how quickly Armenia will cede the four villages, but that this would mark a significant step forward in border delimitation. That is, the report states that Armenia should return the Azerbaijani lands still under occupation, noting the positive effect of this step.

Yes, the report stresses that this position of official Yerevan is directly related to the fear of a new war. But it should be made clear that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on March 17, said that the country was "closer than ever" to a peace agreement with Armenia and that negotiations were in an "active phase". In other words, Azerbaijan is not talking about war, but only about the importance of early peace.

It is therefore his personal problem if Nikol Pashinyan lives in fear of something that does not exist. But it should be added that there were times when he behaved quite differently. His drunken dancing on Jydir Duzu, his phrase "Karabakh is Armenia, and that's it", as well as his financial and military support for the Karabakh junta, which continued even after the 44-day war, all indicate that Pashinyan was determined to provoke. We can only hope that after a series of military and political fiascos in Armenia, he has realised the fallacy of such a strategy. At the same time, I would like to stress that so far we have heard Pashinyan's speeches about the importance of returning only 4 of our villages to Azerbaijan, not 8 under occupation. Besides, this is talking, not acting. The practice has often proved that there is a huge gap between the words and deeds of the Armenian leadership.

It seems that Armenia has become hysterical over something that has never existed. Garnik Danielyan, an MP from the "Armenia" bloc, said in the Armenian parliament: "You turn Lori into a border region, put the gas pipeline under the control of Azerbaijan so that they can install a valve and we get into the situation that the 'Artsakh" people got into, and then you will say: We have not given up anything from the sovereign territory".

In response to him and all those who claim that the Armenian government is ceding villages to Azerbaijan, Pashinyan said: "When we talk about concessions, should we understand what we are conceding? What concession are we talking about? Our position is as follows: the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan should be demarcated and then delimited based on the 1991 Almaty Declaration. Whatever belongs to us belongs to us, whatever doesn't belong to us doesn't belong to us. We should be guided by this logic. This is the most important factor in ensuring Armenia's security."

As we can see, Pashinyan now sounds quite reasonable. We can only regret that he did not adopt a similarly reasonable position before the 44-day war. We would have seen the withdrawal of all illegal Armenian formations from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan and Yerevan's agreement to the full restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country by peaceful means if he had followed the Almaty Declaration. But then he took another path. The way of provocations that led to the military-political defeat of Armenia. And the fact that he is now generally sober is the result of these defeats and a balanced assessment of the new realities.

Now we are waiting for Armenia to move from words to deeds. We hope the wait will not be long.