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Karabakh’s Vardanyan: Close to 100 killed, hundreds injured by Azerbaijan’s ‘war’
A former top official in Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian administration said on Wednesday that close to 100 people had been killed and hundreds more injured in the breakaway region after Azerbaijan started what he cast as a “big war.”
“This is a big war – Azerbaijan has started a full operation,” Ruben Vardanyan, former head of the breakaway region’s government, told Reuters from Karabakh. “This is basically a typical ethnical cleansing operation.”
“Already hundreds of people have been injured and close to 100 people have been killed,” he said. “Everyone is ignoring this: Russia is silent but so is the West.”
Azerbaijan rejects accusations that its aim is to ethnically cleanse Karabakh and says it will protect the rights of the area’s ethnic Armenian civilians under its own constitution.
It says it is determined however to remove the breakaway region’s political and military structures.
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