Surrendering 4 villages of Tavush means dooming Armenia to the same  fate as Artsakh: Atom Margaryan

ArmInfo. Surrendering 4 villages of Tavush means dooming Armenia to the same fate as Artsakh. Atom  Margaryan, Associate Professor of the Department of Economic Theory of the Armenian State University of Economics, shares this opinion.

"This means in a very short time to hand over the valve of the gas  pipeline entering Armenia, the railway and the highway to Georgia to  the Turks. Meanwhile, the return to the cold, hungry and dark years  of the early 1990s will be a matter of months.

So think carefully, compatriots. Get out of your stupor, stand up!  Anyone who wants to transfer these territories opens the door to the  destruction of Armenia.

We must not allow this, we must protect our territories at all costs:  perhaps this will be our new Sardarapat," he wrote on the social  network.

Earlier, Baku demanded the immediate "return" of 4 villages located  on the border of Armenia's Tavush region and Azerbaijan's Kazakh  region. The statement followed a meeting of the border delimitation  commissions, headed by the deputy prime ministers of the two  countries, Mher Grigoryan and Shahin Mustafayev. "As for the four  non-exclave Azerbaijani villages (Baganis Ayrim, Ashagi Eskipara,  Kheyrimli and Gyzylgajili) occupied by Armenia, their belonging to  Azerbaijan is indisputable, and they are subject to immediate  release," the statement said. Baku is also confident that within the  framework of the delimitation process "the issue of liberation of  four exclave villages (Yukhary Askipara, Sofulu, Barkhudarlu in the  Armenian Tavush, as well as Kyarki (Armenian- Tigranashen) in the  Ararat region, on the border with Nakhichevan will be resolved. At  the same time, Baku denied the statements of the Armenian authorities  that Azerbaijan occupied the territory of 31 Armenian settlements in  five regions with a total area of about 200 square kilometers,  considering it "an unfounded statement." Some of them came under the  control of Azerbaijan back in the 1990s during the first Karabakh  war, the others as a result of Azerbaijani aggression in 2021-2022.

Despite this, Pashinyan said at the last press conference that there  have never been villages with such names on the territory of the  Republic of Armenia, not only in Soviet times but also after it. In  his opinion, to avoid problems in the future, it is more correct to  build new communications so that they pass through the de jure  territory of the Republic of Armenia (the territories claimed by  Azerbaijan are located in the Tavush region. There is an interstate  highway connecting Armenia with Georgia - through Ijevan,  Noyemberyan, Bagratashen, ed. note). On April 10, the prime minister  announced his readiness to begin delimitation from the Tavush region,  but he did not guarantee peace even after the transfer of these  territories to Baku.