By Lilit Shahverdyan
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has angrily defended the performance of the country’s peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In September last year the 2,000-strong peacekeeping contingent did not intervene as Baku launched a lightning offensive to retake the region, which resulted in near-complete emptying of its Armenian population.
And that came at the end of a nine-month blockade of the region during which the Russian troops were of limited help in getting supplies into Karabakh and transporting Karabakhis to Armenia for medical treatment.
A number of Armenian officials, most recently Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan, have complained publicly about what they saw as the peacekeepers’ failure to protect the roughly 100,000 local Armenians.
“From September 19, ethnic cleansing started in NK. Until now, we haven’t received any explanation of how the ethnic cleansing occurred in the presence of Russian peacekeepers. We haven’t seen any explanations,” Grigoryan said.