News - Ambassador: Armenia fears Azerbaijani invasion ‘within weeks’

The Armenian ambassador-designate to the EU says his country expects Azerbaijan to invade “within weeks.” Azerbaijan will follow up the capitulation of Nagorno-Karabakh with an attack on Armenia itself, Tigran Balayan says. In an interview with Brussels Signal, Balayan said that Azerbaijani promises to respect international law are hollow. “We are now under imminent threat of invasion into Armenia”, he said. The central problem was that President Ilham Aliyev has not yet met any concrete repercussions for what the Armenian ambassador-designate said were his expansionist plans. There would be no stopping Azerbaijan if it “will not be confronted with very practical steps taken by the so-called collective West”. This follows the Azerbaijani attack on Nagorno-Karabakh in mid-September. The region was an enclave of ethnic Armenians within Azerbaijani territory, but was ruled by the Armenia-backed breakaway Republic of Artsakh. Following what Azerbaijan dubbed a “counter-terrorist operation”, Nagorno-Karabkah capitulated and there followed a mass exodus of the over 100,000 Armenians living there. Now Armenia claims that President Aliyev intends to come for more. Specifically the Zangezur corridor, which separates Azerbaijan proper from its Nakhchivan enclave. While the Azerbaijani Ambassador told Brussels Signal that his country has no designs on Armenia’s internationally-recognised territory, Balayan believed this was bluff. He cited President Aliyev’s previous statements that Azerbaijan would “chase the Armenians like dogs”. Aliyev is also reported by Reuters to have claimed the Zangezur was historical Azerbaijani land in a recent meeting with Turkey’s President Erdoğan. Balayan told this website that there were very “practical” measures the EU could take to confront Azerbaijan and President Aliyev. He suggested the EU must give Aliyev a deadline to withdraw his army from the Armenian border region, and to suspend Azerbaijan’s visa-free travel agreement with the EU if he failed to comply. He also said that “individual sanctions can send a clear message.” This follows a a similar resolution made by the European Parliament on October 5th. MEPs called on the EU to suspend its current energy and visa agreements with the EU.