YEREVAN, July  21, 2023 (BSS/AFP) - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan

warned Friday of the risk of a new war with Azerbaijan, accusing Baku of
"genocide" in the breakaway Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
      
 Baku and Yerevan have fought two wars over the mountainous enclave and the
signature of a peace treaty remains a distant prospect.
      
 Talks under the mediation of the European Union, United States, and Russia
have brought about little progress.
    
  "So long as a peace treaty has not been signed and such a treaty has not
been ratified by the parliaments of the two countries, of course, a (new) war
(with Azerbaijan) is very likely," Pashinyan told AFP.
       
Tensions escalated earlier in July when Azerbaijan temporarily shut the
Lachin corridor, the sole road linking Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
      
 The closure sparked concerns over a humanitarian crisis in the region,
which experiences shortages of food, medicines, and energy.
       
"We're talking not about a preparation of genocide, but an ongoing process
of genocide," Pashinyan told AFP in an interview, referring to the Karabakh
crisis.
    
  The growing diplomatic engagement of the European Union and United States
in the Caucasus has irked traditional regional power broker Russia.
      
 As the latest round of peace talks on July 15 in Brussels failed to bring
about a breakthrough, Pashinyan said that both the West and Russia needed to
increase pressure on Baku to lift its blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh.
      
 "If, according to the logic of some circles in the West, Russia is not
meeting all of our expectations because it is not fulfilling its obligations,
similarly Russia also tells us (the same) about the West," he said.
      
 Nagorno-Karabakh has been at the centre of a decades-long dispute between
the two countries, which have fought two wars over the mountainous territory --
in the 1990s and in 2020.
       
In autumn 2020, a Russian-brokered ceasefire deal saw Armenia cede swathes
of territories it had controlled for decades, while Moscow deployed
peacekeepers to the Lachin Corridor to ensure free passage between Armenia and
Karabakh.