YEREVAN – Lawmakers in Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway Armenian-populated region of Azerbaijan, voted to elect a new separatist president on Saturday in a transfer that was once strongly condemned by way of the Azerbaijani government.
Samvel Shakhramanyan’s election because the new president of Nagorno-Karabakh follows the resignation of Arayik Harutyunyan, who stepped down on Sept. 1 as president of the region — which the Armenians name Artsakh. It comes amid soaring tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry denounced the vote as a “gross violation” of the rustic’s charter and a “serious blow to the efforts of normalization in the region.”
Since December, Azerbaijan has blockaded the one highway main from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, seriously proscribing the supply of meals, clinical provides and different necessities to the region of about 120,000 folks.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a region inside Azerbaijan that got here below the regulate of ethnic Armenian forces subsidized by way of the Armenian army after a six-year separatist warfare that ended in 1994. Armenian forces additionally took regulate of considerable territory across the region.
Azerbaijan regained regulate of the encompassing territory in a six-week warfare with Armenia in 2020. A Russia-brokered armistice that ended the warfare left the region’s capital, Stepanakert, hooked up to Armenia by way of only one highway referred to as the Lachin Corridor, alongside which Russian peacekeeping forces have been meant to make sure loose motion.
Armenia time and again has complained that Russian peacekeepers have finished not anything to lend a hand elevate the Azerbaijani blockade of the street that has resulted in dire meals shortages in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the placement has resulted in an expanding estrangement between Moscow and Yerevan.
Russia has been Armenia’s major financial spouse and best friend because the 1991 Soviet cave in. Landlocked Armenia hosts a Russian army base and is a part of the Moscow-led safety alliance of ex-Soviet international locations, the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
But Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has turn into increasingly more vital of Moscow, emphasizing its failure to lend a hand elevate the Azerbaijani blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh and arguing that Yerevan wishes to show to the West to lend a hand ensure that its safety.
To Moscow’s dismay, Armenia referred to as a joint military exercises with the United States beginning Monday, supplied humanitarian help to Ukraine amid the warfare and moved to ratify a treaty that created the International Criminal Court, which this yr indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for warfare crimes hooked up to the deportation of children from Ukraine.
On Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Armenian ambassador to resort a proper protest over what the strikes it described as “unfriendly.”