Out of the frying pan into the fire

On December 27, Armenian terrorists committed another provocation in the village of Tug in Khojavend region. As a result, a sergeant of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Elmir Rail oglu was killed and a soldier Aliyev Emin Suleiman oglu was wounded.

There are several reasons for this and other provocations that had been committed earlier. First, by doing so, the leaders of the armed formations in NK (Nagorno-Karabakh) - Vitaly Balasanyan and Seyran Ohanyan give a signal to the revanchist forces in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh that although the Armenian army has been defeated and large-scale hostilities have ceased, they are still active and ready continue wars (now sabotage). This is a kind of moral support to the forces wishing to change the power in Armenia and stop the implementation of the trilateral statement on NK, adopted on November 10.

Secondly, this sweet couple wants to turn NK through clashes in the Khojavend region into a zone of active conflict, hoping in this way to attract Russian "peacekeepers" to this region.

Thirdly, by raising the issue of the return of the Armenians of Khojavend, they want to thwart the return of Azerbaijanis to Khankendi and Khojaly. That is, if the Azerbaijanis return to Khojaly, then the Armenians must return to Khojavend.  Moscow is interested in the political component of these provocations. Because the absence of conflict weakens its position. In the long term, this will lead to the termination of the peacekeeping mission and, as a consequence, the loss of mechanism of influencing Azerbaijan and Armenia.

This is not the first sabotage of the gangster underground. Recently (on December 12), as a result of an operation carried out by the  National Security Council (NSC) secret  forces in the villages of Kehne Daglar and Chailakgala of the same Khojavend region, 170 members of an Armenian sabotage group were taken prisoner. They penetrated from Armenia into the territory of Azerbaijan on November 27, that is, 17 days after the signing Peaceful Declaration...  The Azerbaijani special-purpose forces handed over some members of the bandit underground to Russian "peacekeepers", and some of them were delivered to Baku.

The Russian media tried to present them as “lost in the woods” of Armenian soldiers who could not get out to their own in time. However, the Armenian press reported that about 20 days before the clash with the State Security Service special-purpose forces, volunteers arrived in Azerbaijan from the Shirak and Hoktemberyan regions of Armenia along a corridor controlled by Russian peacekeepers.

In a word, members of a large sabotage group arrived in Khankendi through the Lachin corridor, passing through the checkpoints of the Russian peacekeepers. This is a serious "flaw" (if not deliberate inaction) of the Russian "peacekeepers". According to sources who wished to remain anonymous, currently there are 3-4 thousand terrorists in NK.

Peacekeeping operations are subdivided into two types: peacekeeping operations and peace enforcement operations. The difference between them is that peacekeeping operations are carried out with the consent of all the main conflicting parties and are aimed at monitoring and implementing the ceasefire agreements already reached, while peace enforcement operations are carried out with the aim of creating an atmosphere for a truce or ceasefire. These may include restoring order operations, forcibly disengaging warring parties, and establishing exclusion zones and enforcing them.

Peace enforcement does not imply the consent of the warring parties to intervene. During peace enforcement operations, weapons and military equipment can be used not only for self-defense purposes, but also for the destruction of military installations and armed groups participating in the conflict.

The international legal basis for an operation to enforce peace may be a decision of the UN Security Council adopted based on Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which provides for compulsory actions (measures) in the event of a threat to peace. In our case, the talk is not about conducting a peace enforcement operation, but about a peacekeeping operation.

Peacebuilding is an integral part of this mission - activities carried out after the end of an internal or international conflict to restore the foundations of peace. It includes supporting actions and institutions that help consolidate peace, negotiating agreements and organizing interactions between former enemies, holding or supervising elections, rebuilding civilian infrastructure and economic recovery.

To implement the above, it is needed to identify and support structures that will tend to contribute to the consolidation and consolidation of peace in order to prevent a relapse into conflict. A  set of measures for the demobilization, reintegration of combatants and the implementation of a democratic transition, after which the inevitable conflicts could be resolved not by military, but by political means.

However, we do not see Russian "peacekeepers" engaged in the expulsion of units of the Armenian Armed Forces from the territory of NK, the reintegration of combatants, the return of Azerbaijani refugees, reconciliation and socio-psychological rehabilitation of warring ethnic groups, the restoration of institutions of political power and civil society. Instead, we see the embrace of the commander of the group of Russian peacekeepers in NK Rustam Muradov in the arms of the leader of the separatist terrorists Arayik Harutyunyan, who is on the international wanted list. In NK, along with the Russian flag, the flags of Armenia and the separatist entity are everywhere.  There is a flag of the separatists on the website of the Russian Ministry of Defense is there.

Despite the trilateral statement does not say anything about the status of NK, Russia not only incites separatists in Karabakh, but at the same time offers the international community a solution to the Karabakh conflict. This is evidenced by the statements of Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 17 at a press conference. He said that the solution to the issue of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh should be transferred to the future, now it is necessary to maintain the status quo.

 “The status of Nagorno-Karabakh itself should remain unchanged, that is, it should be transferred to the future. The status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh should be fixed, but with the obligatory creation of the possibility of communication between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, for which it was supposed to create the so-called Lachin corridor, that is this is a communication corridor between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” Putin stressed.

A week later, Speaker of the Russian Federation Council Valentina Matvienko not only echoed Putin, but also went even further by inviting the UN and OSCE to take part in resolving this conflict.

“The status of Nagorno-Karabakh requires additional negotiations. We certainly count on the efforts of the OSCE, the President of France, the President of the United States and other states that are involved in the settlement process in Nagorno-Karabakh,” she said.

As we can see, Russia is trying to demonstrate that Azerbaijan rejects the OSCE Minsk Group, while Moscow wants to settle the Karabakh conflict in the international arena. Thus, she wants to put Azerbaijan in a difficult position to force the start of new negotiations and the political process in international negotiations, of course, under her control. As they say, out of the frying pan into the fire.

Perhaps for this reason Baku is now extremely cautious. However, if there is not a decisive and serious response to provocations in Karabakh, the situation may become even more complicated. Therefore, now the only way out is not to retreat from their position under any circumstances and to severely punish the Armenian terrorists. Therefore, the arrested saboteurs must be punished like terrorists, since the war is over and the provocateurs cannot be considered prisoners of war. All actions aimed at undermining the peace process, regardless of which side they come from, must be suppressed fully by the laws of Azerbaijan.