The displaced residents of Hadrut and other regions of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) marched to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Armenia after holding a protest in front of the government building.

“We would like for the representatives of the embassy organize a meeting with us in some way. The Embassy of the Russian Federation is the only embassy that hasn’t paid heed to our requests for exactly one year. We don’t understand. We must organize a meeting and understand why. The French Embassy hosted a meeting with us, and we have held several meetings with the US Embassy online. We are here to speak out about the peaceful resident who was killed in Martakert.

Besides being a co-chairing country [of the OSCE Minsk Group], Russia also has pretensions and is the country that is the most interested, most represented and most powerful in the region,” he said, adding that there have been several incidents in Artsakh over the past year. “All the incidents were tolerable, if at least there weren’t any gunshots in the direction of military posts, but the recent shooting was fired directly at a person. I can’t understand how a powerful country like Russia can’t restrain Azerbaijan, especially since it has been constantly gifting Azerbaijan in terms of politics and blaming the Armenian side for everything. We have come to demand that the Russians implement their peacekeeping mission properly,” the head of an NGO said.

Another resident of Hadrut stated that Russia needs to demand that Azerbaijan remove its troops at least 3-5 km from Armenian settlements and create a buffer zone that won’t allow snipers to shoot or hurt peaceful civilians.