Monday, 6 January 2025

Regional

• The US State Department has told Voice of America’s Armenian service that it is ready to work with Armenia and Azerbaijan ‘in any format where both parties can agree on where they can make progress’ on a peace treaty.
• On Monday, the Armenian Defence Ministry refuted the Azerbaijani accusations that the Armenian military had fired on Azerbaijani positions in the southeastern section of the border on 5 January.

Armenia

• Tiran Khachatryan, Former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, has been arrested and sent to pre-trial detention for two months. According to the charges, Khachatryan demonstrated a ‘negligent attitude’ towards the performance of his official duties during the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, ‘which negligently caused serious consequences’. Khachatryan was previously awarded the title of National Hero for his service during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.
• On Friday afternoon, three people were injured as a result of a warehouse fire at the Bagratashen border crossing point by the Armenia-Georgia state border.

Azerbaijan

• On Friday, Azerbaijan Railways announced the resumption of passenger train services on the Baku-Balakan-Baku route. The fares range from  ₼18 ($11) to  ₼72 ($43), depending on the class and route segment. The service was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Turan reported that a recently released video of a 1993 speech by former Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan has drawn sharp criticism from the Azerbaijani community, which has accused the Armenian state of condoning ethnic cleansing. In the speech, Ter-Petrosyan said ‘Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh resolved a 600-year-old problem by completely cleansing the territory of foreigners’, referring to ethnic Azerbaijanis.
• Tahira Tahirgizi, the mother of Rufat Safarov, an imprisoned activist and the chair of the human rights organisation 'Protection Line', has been  banned from leaving Azerbaijan.
• On 5 January, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski called his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov. During the phone call, the two ministers discussed the issues that Poland will prioritise during its six-month chair of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, Azerbaijan-EU relations, as well as the future prospects of the bloc’s Eastern Partnership program.

Georgia

• The visit to Tbilisi by the President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Pia Kauma, is scheduled for 8–10 January, Latvian MEP Rihards Kols reported. International partners and the local opposition have called on Kauma to postpone the visit.
• Former Deputy Prosecutor General of Georgia Natia Merebashvili, whose resignation was reported by TV Pirveli on Sunday, told RFE/RL that her decision to leave her post was a long-term decision and was not related to the current political crisis in Georgia.
• The Ministry of Internal Affairs announced on Saturday that it is expelling 25 foreign citizens from Georgia who participated in the protests. Of those who were announced as being on the list of deportees, 10 have already left Georgia.
• The MEGOBARI Act has been introduced to the 119th US Congress. On Saturday, Representative Joe Wilson posted on X that he had reintroduced the act along with Representatives Steve Cohen, Richard Hudson, and Mark Wiese. The MEGOBARI Act mandates further sanctions against Georgian officials as well as funding for Georgian media and civil society. It was first introduced in May in response to Georgia’s foreign agent law.

North Caucasus

• On Saturday, residents of the Ingush city of Nazran gathered for a spontaneous rally against construction that started at the site of an old bus station. Since 2018, city authorities have promised to build a park there — but as of now, the foundations for an unknown object are in its place.
• On Friday, Ramazan Rabadanov, a well-known Daghestani sports commentator, was released from a pre-trial detention centre under house arrest. Rabadanov had helped defend those arrested during antisemitic riots in Makhachkala in November 2023, and was detained in November 2024 on the charge of illegally possessing weapons. The defence has claimed the falsification and planting of evidence.

For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.