BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union agreed Monday to send a civilian project to Armenia to help bolster security around its border and relations with neighboring Azerbaijan amid tensions over a departure lounge in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The mission, which it requested through Armenia and has a two-year mandate, will “conduct regime patrols” in border spaces to “strengthen the EU’s understanding of the scenario on the ground,” the bloc said in a statement.
“The EU will continue de-escalation efforts and is committed to working strongly with both sides towards the ultimate goal of lasting peace in the region,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are locked in a decades-long dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of Armenian-backed ethnic Armenian forces since the end of a separatist war in 1994.
Now, two years after ex-Soviet countries ended a war that killed about 6,800 infantrymen and displaced some 90,000 civilians, tensions between them are rising over a dispute centered on a six-kilometer (nearly four-mile) highway known as the Lachin Corridor. . .
The winding road is the land link between Armenia and the ethnic Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. It has been blocked since mid-December by protesters claiming to be environmental activists, threatening the food source of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 inhabitants.
The dispute raises fears of renewal and casts doubt on the intentions of Russia, whose peacekeepers are tasked with securing the way.
The EU has tried to broker a deal between them and helped bring its two leaders to the negotiating table last October to advance talks on a European-backed border mission.