At a government meeting on March 16, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan accused Azerbaijan of taking concrete steps to aggravate the situation.

"Despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that obliged Azerbaijan to end the blockade of [the separatist] Nagorno-Karabakh, Baku continues to illegally keep closed the only accessible asphalted road linking Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. As a result, the humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh remains very tense. At the same time, we see concrete steps by Azerbaijan aimed at exacerbating the situation from the military point of view," Pashinyan said.

He noted that the latest manifestation of this was the killing of three Nagorno-Karabakh policemen by an Azerbaijani subversive group on March 5. "Another incident took place in the zone of responsibility of Russian peacekeepers. It is important to record that the Ministry of Defense of Russia said in its weekly bulletin on March 6 that the incident was initiated by the Azerbaijani side," Pashinyan said. "In this regard, I think that the circumstance that the killing of the policemen took place in the Lachin corridor should be particularly assessed," he said.

Moreover, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has again criticized Russian peacekeepers for doing little to protect the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijani attacks.

Pashinyan said that when deciding to deploy peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia officially admitted the likelihood of massacres of civilians (by Azerbaijan) and assumed the role of security guarantor for them. "We hope that Russia will fulfill these obligations in full. But if Russia, which is Armenia's friend and an ally, is unable to fulfill this function for some objective or subjective reasons, then it should address the UN Security Council and inform it about the threat of destroying civilians and infrastructures (in Nagorno-Karabakh) and convey to it the necessity of additional international mechanisms to exclude that," he said.

"It is just that the sequence of events over the past two years, such as the occupation of Khtsaberd [Chaylaggala in Azerbaijani] and Hin Tagher [Kohne Taghlar in Azerbaijani] villages by Azerbaijan, the events in Parukh and the illegal blockade of Lachin corridor, killings of policemen and civilians, the periodic violation of the ceasefire, actions aimed at terrorizing civilians, raise these concerns," the Prime Minister said. At the same time, he noted the special role of the peacekeepers because, thanks to their efforts, the humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh has not turned into a humanitarian disaster.

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