Armenia and Azerbaijan announced on Tuesday that they had begun demarcating their common borders, in a step of great importance for the two countries, which have faced bloody conflicts in the Caucasus region that have spanned more than 100 years.
A statement issued by the Ministry of the Interior of Azerbaijan said that a group of experts began “clarifying the coordinates on the basis of a geodesic study.”
The Armenian Ministry of the Interior, for its part, confirmed the “demarcation work” of the border, ruling out “the transfer of any part of Armenia’s sovereign territory” to Baku following the operation.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan last month accepted Baku’s request to reclaim four border towns captured by Yerevan’s forces during a war in the 1990s.
This decision sparked a protest by hundreds of Armenians in an area bordering Azerbaijan, who feared that they would be isolated and that some of their property would become under Azerbaijani sovereignty. On Monday, they briefly cut off an adjacent traffic lane linking Armenia to Georgia, which constitutes for local residents the primary crossing point to the outside world. They also tried to obstruct mine clearance work.
On Tuesday, new protests broke out in several regions of Armenia, especially around Lake Sevan and the city of Numbrian.
The two countries located in the Caucasus region expressed last week their intention to demarcate borders on the basis of maps dating back to the Soviet era.
Pashinyan stressed the need to resolve border disputes in order to “avoid a new war” with Azerbaijan.
The two countries, which were former republics of the Soviet Union, faced off in two bloody wars, the first in the 1990s, from which Armenia emerged victorious and claimed the lives of more than 30,000 people, and the second in 2020, won by Azerbaijan, led to the deaths of more than 6,000 people.
After Armenia’s defeat in 2020, Yerevan was forced to abandon large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and the vicinity of this region, which it had controlled for about thirty years.
In September 2022, Baku launched a lightning attack that led to the surrender of Armenian separatists within a few days, after which it reimposed its control over the entire Nagorno-Karabakh region.