Armenia responds to Azerbaijan’s fascism accusation: They want to provoke tensions

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has urged Azerbaijan to cool tensions and to stick to dialogue instead of resorting to accusations and threats.

Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said on Tuesday that independent Armenia is a threat to the region and “a fascist state in its nature” in an interview with local media, reacting to the reform of Armenia’s army and its arms deals with France.

Responding, Pashinyan said: “Perhaps [Azeri capital] Baku is trying to “legitimize” the escalation in the region. They make aggressive statements in the hope of an aggressive response from [Armenian capital] Yerevan, which [in turn] allows Baku to make its [own] statements more aggressive.

“[When] combined with the spread of false information about the violation of the ceasefire by the Armenian army, [this will] form a “justification” for a new escalation in the region,” Pashinyan told Armenpress on Wednesday.

Aliyev and his government have been accused of stirring up ethnic hatred against Armenians. Azerbaijan has fought a series of wars against its neighbor since 2020. In September 2023, Azerbaijani forces conquered the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, sparking an exodus of its entire 100,000-strong ethnic Armenian population — drawing allegations of ethnic cleansing from Western NGOs and watchdogs.

Aliyev’s fascism claim came after the Azeri defense ministry accused the Armenian army of shooting at Azeri army positions on the southeastern border between the two states on Jan. 5. The Armenian Defense Ministry dismissed the accusations as disinformation in a statement on Sunday.

“[The] armament of Armenia will lead to new tensions. We don’t want that. We want peace … But independent Armenia is a fascist state at its core. Fascism must be destroyed by [the] Armenian leadership or we will do it ourselves,” Aliyev told local TV channels on Tuesday.

The two countries have been in a decades-long conflict since the fall of the Soviet Union. In recent years the U.S. and the EU have been pushing for a diplomatic solution amid hopes that a lasting peace deal can be signed.

 “We will not use the language of aggression, but the language of dialogue. We will continue to focus on demarcation, on agreeing on the text of the peace treaty, [and on an] agreement on humanitarian issues, including the problems of discovering the fate of the missing,” Pashinyan said.

Gabriel Gavin contributed reporting to this story.