After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three former republics of the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, failed to demarcate and delimit their borders. This failure has resulted in regular incidents across the fringes of each nation’s respective territory. The well-publicized border disputes between Armenian and Azerbaijan are complex in nature, and the two…
Written by Narine Khachatryan Over the past months, right-wing groups and individuals in Armenia have been actively campaigning on and offline against the ratification of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (more widely known as the Istanbul Convention). What the controversy in Armenia? Armenia signed the…
Recent satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows ongoing engineering works by the Azerbaijani armed forces on the Nakhichevan border into what was once considered neutral territory. Azerbaijani attempts to sidle up closer to the Armenian frontline since the 1994 ceasefire have primarily taken place on the Nagorno-Karabakh border, reducing the point of contact to fewer…
Throughout this summer, dozens of residents of Armenia’s Jermuk community and several other surrounding regions, including the villages of Gndevaz and Kechut, have been blocking all roads leading to the Amulsar mountain, a site targeted for gold mining to be operated by Lydian Armenia. The protesters began camping at the entrances to the mountain in…
This post was originally by Bellingcat for Planet Stories. In August, Bellingcat published an article about Lydian International’s plans to start a large-scale gold mining operation at the Amulsar mountain in Armenia. For the first piece, we chose to focus mainly on satellite imagery and show how Lydian’s construction of its heap leaching facility (HLF) has progressed just…
The peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan was severely weakened due to the April 2016 four-day war, with further complications due to Azerbaijan asserting its military prowess through a build-up in its exclave of Nakhichevan. This military build-up in Nakhichevan has led to Armenia becoming a more hesitant partner in the OSCE mediation efforts. Additionally,…
This article appeared on Planet Stories Lydian International, a mining company now registered in Jersey in the United Kingdom, intends to conduct a large-scale mining project for gold in the Armenian mountain of Amulsar, approximately twelve kilometers away from the southern Armenian spa town of Jermuk. Lydian began exploratory works for the Amulsar Gold Project in…
On July 17, Armenia marked the one-year anniversary of the armed takeover of the Erebuni police station in the capital Yerevan. Around three dozen radical anti-government gunmen, who called themselves the Daredevils of Sassoun, seized the police patrol service regiment area in Yerevan’s southern Erebuni district on July 17, 2016, demanding the resignation of Armenian…
The numerous cases of violence targeting journalists in Armenia during its April 2, 2017, parliamentary elections highlight the failure of the state’s authorities to keep their promise of ensuring that elections would be held on the highest level possible. At least ten journalists of local media outlets were reported to have been subjected to obstruction…
The Red line illustrates the distance between the demarcation line and the newly seized post of Lele Tepe, a distance of approximately 1 km. On April 2nd, reports began to flood in from the Northern villages of Karabagh regarding a major Azerbaijani offensive on their territory. By April 3rd, Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev openly admitted that…
