Armenia's PM says he must return disputed areas to Azerbaijan or face war
Armenia could face a war with Azerbaijan if it does not compromise with Baku and return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in a video published on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
Pashinyan was speaking during a meeting on Monday with residents of border areas in northern Armenia's Tavush region, close to a string of deserted Azerbaijani villages that Yerevan has controlled since the early 1990s.
The four villages, which have been uninhabited for over 30 years, are of strategic value to Armenia as they straddle the main road between Yerevan and the Georgian border.
Azerbaijan has said the return of its lands, which also include several tiny enclaves entirely surrounded by Armenian territory, is a necessary precondition for a peace deal to end three decades of conflict over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku's forces retook last September.
Russia's TASS state news agency quoted Pashinyan as telling residents in the video clip that was circulated by his government that failure to compromise over the disputed villages could lead to war with Azerbaijan "by the end of the week".
"I know how such a war would end," he added.
Yerevan suffered a major defeat last September when Baku's forces retook Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive, prompting almost all of that region's estimated 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.
