Analysts treat Nagorno-Karabakh's status as reason for conflict escalation

By its military actions, Azerbaijan is trying to speed up the implementation of the tripartite declaration on ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to prevent discussion of its status, the analysts interviewed by the "Caucasian Knot" believe.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on August 3, Azerbaijan announced a "Retribution" operation in Nagorno-Karabakh in response to the murder of an Azerbaijani serviceman. The MoD also reported that the Azerbaijani Army had captured a number of dominant heights. Baku demanded an immediate removal of Armenian militaries from Nagorno-Karabakh and threatened "even more destructive countermeasures" in case of provocations on the contact line. The authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh called for the world community to respond to Baku's actions. In the evening on August 4, the Russian MoD announced that the peacemakers registered four violations of the ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh during the day.

Naira Airumyan, a political observer, believes that Russia and Azerbaijan are speeding up the implementation of the tripartite statement. "Such haste suggests that they have fears of a possible change in the negotiations format. Any such format involves discussing the status of Nagorno-Karabakh and its territorial borders, which is absent in the tripartite Moscow-Baku-Yerevan format," Ms Airumyan has explained.

She is sure that Armenia has real leverage to prevent such a course of events by insisting on changing the negotiations format. "There is another option, as many political forces assert: Pashinyan should resign and nullify at least his oral agreements," Naira Airumyan has concluded.

Tigran Grigoryan, a political analyst, also agrees that Azerbaijan is trying to speed up the implementation of the agreements reached earlier by means of military operations. "The latest escalation only aims to speed up the process that had already been agreed," he told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on August 6, 2022 at 07:31 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.