YEREVAN. – At Thursday's Cabinet meeting, the interim government of Armenia made a decision aimed at allocating additional funds for support to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).

Acting Minister of Finance Atom Janjughazyan noted that the purpose of this decision is to fund the expenses of the population of Artsakh for electricity, natural gas supply and communication services for July 2021, as well as the salaries, benefits, pensions, and healthcare expenses for July envisaged by the 2021 Artsakh state budget.

"To allocate 8.8 billion drams, of which 1.2 billion drams will be used for the payment of utility bills by the [Artsakh] residents, and the rest will be allocated to the Artsakh Republic within the framework of providing an interstate loan," Janjughazyan said.

Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in his turn, stated: "With this decision, we allocate another 8.7bn-dram interstate loan to Artsakh. Fourteen projects have been implemented since [last] November. In total, 53 billion drams have been spent at the moment.”

Also, the acting premier enumerated the assistance programs that have been implemented in Artsakh after the war last fall, noting that a total of about 74 billion drams of such assistance programs were implemented so far. "These 9 billion drams are added to it, too, and we can record that our package of assistance to Artsakh already totals 83 billion drams, of which 52 billion drams have already been spent," Pashinyan added.