By Ani Avetisyan
On December 13 Armenia and Azerbaijan conducted a prisoner swap on the rival states’ common border, with Armenia handing over two Azerbaijani captives in exchange for Azerbaijan releasing 32 Armenian prisoners.
The handover had been announced in a surprise joint statement by the two countries’ leaders six days earlier. That statement said the sides were resolved to “continue their discussions regarding the implementation of more confidence-building measures … and call on the international community to support their efforts that will contribute to building mutual trust between the two countries and will positively impact the entire South Caucasus region.”
It also announced that Armenia would support Azerbaijan’s ultimately successful bid to host next year’s COP-29 climate conference.
The two Azerbaijani soldiers released had crossed into Armenia in April. One of them was convicted of murdering a security guard at a copper-molybdenum mine in southern Armenia and had been serving a life sentence in prison.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan posted the names of the freed prisoners on Facebook hours before they arrived in Armenia. The prisoners were mostly from the north-western Shirak region. While there is no information about when and where the released soldiers were captured, 57 soldiers, mainly from the Shirak region, were taken captive from the Hadrut region of Nagorno-Karabakh about a month after the end of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in late 2020. Some of them had been released earlier through Russian and Western mediation at different times.
