Yerevan daily: Baku offers Armenians to stay in Lachin and take Azerbaijani citizenship Seven families agreed to stay in Karabakh

Yerevan-based Hraparak daily, citing its sources, reported on some details of the situation in the city of Lachin and the village of Zabukh, which are due to return to Azerbaijani control on August 25. According to the newspaper, Azerbaijan did not set the evacuation of Armenians from those settlements as an indispensable precondition.

According to the newspaper, Baku agrees that about 350 Armenians living in this territory will continue to live there, provided that they become citizens of Azerbaijan and live in accordance with the laws of Azerbaijan. For example, Armenians live in Türkiye in the same way, submitting to the authorities and laws of this state.

In this case, the Armenian authorities will not bear any responsibility for the lives and safety of the Armenians left to live in Lachin and Zabukh. "They have neither the will nor the strength to organise self-defence and live as part of Azerbaijan. After the 2020 war, our nation is broken and is unlikely to be able to carry out such a local and dangerous program. Therefore, people have resigned themselves to evacuation and are already packing their belongings, preparing to leave the territories," Hraparak writes.

The newspaper also notes that some are even removing tombstones, taking handfuls of earth from graves to rebury, dismantling houses, and taking everything they can so that life does not start from scratch in a new place. "They are advised not to burn houses because it makes no sense - Azerbaijanis professing Islam do not usually live in Armenian houses. They are given another argument: if you burn down houses in Zabukh, the Azerbaijanis will retaliate by cutting off water, electricity, and communications. By the way, there are already rumors that the electricity will be cut off since August 22," Hraparak says.

In his turn, Andranik Chavushyan, the fake head of the Zabukh village council, told Hraparak in an interview that the process of relocation of Armenians from the village was in full swing, but neither the Armenian authorities nor the remaining separatist entity in Karabakh offered even temporary housing to the evacuees. At the same time, Chavushyan stressed that only 7 out of 54 families who lived in Zabukh intend to stay in Karabakh, while the rest will move to Armenia, where they have been promised AMD 10 million certificates for housing. Chavushyan himself intends to move to Khankendi.

Referring to the destruction of houses in Zabukh so that they don't go to Azerbaijanis, Chavushyan noted that "the Azerbaijanis are demolishing everything anyway and building from scratch."

"I don't think Azerbaijanis will live in the houses where Armenians lived," Chavushyan said.