YEREVAN, March 24. /TASS/. Nagorno-Karabakh is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe because Azerbaijan has shut off its gas supply, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at a government meeting on Thursday.
"Artsakh (unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic - TASS) is deliberately deprived of the opportunity to heat its homes, kindergartens and hospitals. This is enough to understand that as a result of Azerbaijan's actions Artsakh is facing a looming humanitarian catastrophe," he said.
According to Pashinyan, Azerbaijan's cutoff of the gas supply to Nagorno-Karabakh shows that Baku does not tolerate Armenians living there and is trying to complete its policy of ethnically cleansing the Armenian population.
"Azerbaijan is touting that they won a glorious victory in the 2020 war. But everything indicates that, after so much suffering, and there are now about 117,000 Armenians living in Artsakh, Azerbaijan considers it its biggest defeat and is pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing in Artsakh," he stated.
The premier also added that "it is symbolic that the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said that the gas supply issue to Artsakh is Azerbaijan’s internal matter." "If translated from diplomatic language, this statement would mean a call to the international community not to look in this direction and allow us (Azerbaijan - TASS) to complete the liberation of Artsakh from Armenians through ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide," he added.
On Tuesday, the Armenian Foreign Ministry accused Azerbaijan of cutting off gas supplies to Nagorno Karabakh near the town of Shushi, leaving the 120,000 residents of the region facing a humanitarian crisis.