Ukrainian media publishes article on long list of war crimes committed against Azerbaijan, Ukraine

While horrific war crimes are currently occurring on the territory of Ukraine and international calls for the creation of a war tribunal to try Russia are becoming louder each day, the Depo.Ua portal has published an article reporting on these and the multitude of equally vicious war crimes that have been committed against Azerbaijan by Armenia. The article titled “War Crimes against Ukraine and Azerbaijan” has been written by the Head of the Center for Internal and Political Studies of Ukraine, Vyacheslav Potapenko together with the Senior Advisor of the Azerbaijani Center for Analysis of Internal Relations, Shahmar Hajiyev.

The article recalls, that the concept of war crimes emerged together with the interpretation of international humanitarian law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 are aimed at prohibiting the use of means and methods by the belligerents.

It points out, that in the last century, together with international agreements, complex legal norms for the conduct of war have emerged, in particular with regard to the use of illegal weapons in both internal and external armed conflicts. Today these rules are referred to as “International humanitarian law”. To this end, both Ukraine and Azerbaijan suffered from war crimes during the bloody conflicts, with the Russian-Ukrainian war continuing to this day.

Armenian war crimes committed between 1992-1994 have also been recorded by independent international reports, even after the Second Karabakh War. According to official data, Armenia has violated international humanitarian law and rules to such an extent, that the trying of the perpetrators of these crimes, the detection of these actions and their prosecution according to existing jurisdiction are vital at this stage.

In March 2022, the UN established the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, which created a report for the UN General Assembly. The commission’s latest report for October 2022 noted that during the first investigation, the commission confirmed that war crimes, violations of human rights and international humanitarian law had been committed in Ukraine since 24 February 2022 with the armed forces of Russia responsible for the vast majority of violations revealed.

The article continues by listing facts connected with the war crimes against Ukraine and Azerbaijan, violations of international humanitarian law.

It recalls, that the Independent International Commission of Inquiry had documented cases of mass killings, unlawful arrests, torture, ill-treatment, illegal deportation, rape and other forms of sexual violence in the territories occupied by the Russian Armed Forces with the number of civilian casualties continuing to rise.

From 24 February to 17 October 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has recorded 6,306 deaths and 9,602 wounded in Ukraine. Months of fighting have severely damaged the country’s infrastructure together with thousands of homes as well as the health and education sectors. Millions of people lost their homes and were forced to flee. As a result, more than seven million people had to find refuge outside the borders of Ukraine, and more than six million are internally displaced persons.

The damage caused by the war in Ukraine is, as reported in this piece, approaching close to $350 billion.

The authors then paid special attention to Armenian war crimes against Azerbaijan. In the middle of the 20th century, Armenian war crimes were temporarily reduced and manifested only in the activities of terrorist organizations that operated secretly in the Armenian-populated regions of the Middle East and Europe, such as under the name “The Secret of Freedom of Armenia”.

In the 1980s, Armenia’s territorial claims to the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan were first expressed, resulting in the activities of Armenian terrorist organizations starting to be directed towards Azerbaijan.

In the second half of the 1980s, Armenian terrorists blew up passenger buses and subway trains in Azerbaijan, recorded as terrorist acts. The violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s claimed more than 2,000 lives.

After these incidents and after gaining independence in 1991, the Republic of Armenia effectively occupied the territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan by resorting to terrorism and putting forward its territorial claims against Azerbaijan.

It points out that more than 6,000 ethnic Armenians living in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Russia, France, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece and the US were equipped with weapons and financed by the Armenian diaspora and actively participated in events that forced more than 1 million Azerbaijanis to leave their internationally recognized territories. Among them were today notorious terrorists such as Monte Melkonyan, Vazgen Sislian and Grant Margaryan.

During the years of the Armenian occupation, terrorist tactics were widely used to oppress the Azerbaijani population. While multiple such incidents occurred, the fate of the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly has to be mentioned, in which 613 civilians, including 106 women and 63 children, were brutally killed on the night of 25 to 26 February 1992.