ArmInfo.The corresponding military specialists are dealing with the issue of the presence of militants in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova announced this on November 27 during a weekly briefing.
"This work does not imply public commenting on their every step, but I can assure you that it is being carried out. It is being conducted, of course, with the parties to the conflict, and in principle, with those experts who have either the data or the ability to participate in resolving this issue. It may be a very complicated formulation, but it speaks about the main thing - the work is underway and the issue is under constant control of our military," the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
At the same time, referring to the statements of the President of the Russian Federation about informal armed formations, Zakharova during her communication with the media on November 17, recalled that Putin used this term in relation to the persons transferred by Turkey to the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh armed conflict. "That is, we were talking about such armed formations, the status and functioning of which does not correspond to the formal requirements of the law. As for the international legal qualification of this situation, it is known that during the above-mentioned armed conflict, the norms of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 are applied.
In particular, in the context of this conflict, redeployed fighters fall under the category of mercenaries, as the redeployed persons have been recruited abroad to fight in an armed conflict. In fact, they took a direct part in hostilities, took part in hostilities for personal gain - high material rewards, "Zakharova said, adding that according to data from open sources, the amount of this remuneration was up to 2 thousand dollars per month. She also stated that they were not part of the personnel of any party to the armed conflict; were not citizens of a party to the conflict; not permanently resident in territory controlled by a party to the conflict; were not sent by a state that is not a party to the conflict for performing official duties as a member of the Armed Forces. "Since mercenary formations cannot be considered legal participants in an armed conflict, the Russian president quite reasonably used the characterization of informal armed formations. It indicates their status as not meeting the formal requirements of international law," Zakharova said.
She also did not comment on the issue of vandalism practiced by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces against memorial plaques in the territory of the Armenian cemetery.
It should be noted that after Azerbaijan's large-scale military aggression against Artsakh, a number of media outlets wrote about hundreds of Syrian militants associated with Turkey deployed to Karabakh and about the readiness to send "hundreds more" of militias to the Karabakh conflict zone.
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad said that mercenaries from Syria are being deployed to Karabakh, and Turkey is using terrorists from Syria and other countries in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In turn, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, also reported that, according to the information available to the Service, mercenaries from international terrorist organizations fighting in the Middle East are actively pulling into the conflict zone, and we are talking about hundreds and even thousands of radicals.
French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke about the transfer of 300 Syrian militants across Turkey to Baku in early October. The leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey, despite providing numerous factual evidence of their involvement in the hostilities, denied their involvement.
The Russian Foreign Minister noted that the number of militants participating in the conflict is in the thousands.