After international pressure, Armenia provided some maps, but these covered only a small portion of the landmine-planted areas and were only 25% accurate. Over 55% of recent landmine cases have occurred outside the areas covered by these maps.

Axar.az reports that Foreign Ministry spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada said this in an interview with Envoy magazine on the occasion of the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.

The spokesperson explained that Karabakh is among the most heavily mine-contaminated regions due to Armenia’s military occupation of Azerbaijani territories for over three decades.

Azerbaijan has suffered from the landmine threat and had many landmine victims throughout the 30-year-long military occupation of its territories by Armenia. Over the course of these three decades, more than 3,400 Azerbaijanis fell victim to landmines, including 359 children and 38 women. Despite the end of the 44-day Patriotic War and the end of the conflict in 2020, Armenia continued its deployment of landmines until its forces were eventually forced to leave Azerbaijani territories as a result of the local anti-terror measures in September 2023.

In 2022, it was revealed that more than 2,700 anti-personnel landmines, produced in Armenia in 2021, had been planted in the Lachin and Kalbajar regions of Azerbaijan. This revelation proved that Armenia’s long-standing claims of non-production and non-export of landmines were completely false. Furthermore, following the anti-terror measures in September 2023, more than 500,000 landmines were discovered in Azerbaijani territories, including those where the Russian peacekeeping forces had been deployed. This underscores the scale of the ongoing threat. Since the end of the war in November 2020, 383 Azerbaijanis have become victims of landmine explosions.

The spokesperson explained that despite Azerbaijan’s repeated calls on Armenia, both before the 44-day Patriotic War and during the post-conflict period, to provide landmine maps in order to put an end to the landmine threat, this country for a long time denied the existence of such maps.

“After international pressure, Armenia provided some maps, but these covered only a small portion of the landmine-planted areas and were only 25% accurate. Over 55% of recent landmine cases have occurred outside the areas covered by these maps.

Moreover, while Armenia’s maps indicated that approximately 400,000 landmines were planted in Azerbaijan’s territories, the actual number is closer to 1.5 million. This sort of behavior displayed by Armenia in relation to the landmine threat is yet another setback to the peace and confidence-building measures taken during the post-conflict period in the region. In this regard, we deem it of utmost importance for the international community to take consistent measures to condemn the landmine threat posed by Armenia and expect Armenia to submit accurate maps of all landmined sites that have not yet been fully presented to Azerbaijan. It is crucial that Armenia provide accurate maps of all landmine sites to allow for the safe return of IDPs and the rebuilding of affected regions,” said Hajizada.

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