Below is the full statement issued by the Foreign Ministry.

“The statements that President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev made on April 18, 2023 once again demonstrate his intentions to torpedo the efforts of the Armenian side and the international community aimed at establishing peace in the South Caucasus.

With these statements Ilham Aliyev demonstrates an overt contempt for various international partners, in the presence and mediation of which Azerbaijan recognized the territorial integrity of Armenia and assumed a number of clear obligations, including both the delimitation of the borders between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan on the basis of the Almaty Declaration and on the establishment of an international mechanism to address the rights and security guarantees for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Moreover, by his statement the President of Azerbaijan openly admits the fact of the preplanned aggression and occupation of the sovereign territories of the Republic of Armenia and also explicitly reveals his intentions to subject the population of Nagorno-Karabakh to ethnic cleansing. The President of Azerbaijan, under whose leadership gross and flagrant institutional violations of human rights and the rights of various groups are taking place in the country, openly voices existential threats towards the peaceful population of Nagorno-Karabakh living in their homeland.

The hate speech expressed by the top leadership of Azerbaijan towards the Armenian people is clearly aimed at deepening the intolerance and hatred towards the Armenian people which has been propagated in the Azerbaijani society by the state authorities for decades. The consequences of this hate speech are also the war crimes, extrajudicial executions of prisoners of war and civilian captives, committed by the representatives of the Azerbaijani armed forces on the basis of ethnicity, video recordings and their distribution by those who committed such crimes as а matter of pride.

The statements of the political leadership of Azerbaijan also encourage actions like those of the Azerbaijani soldier who illegally infiltrated the territory of the Republic of Armenia a few days ago, deliberately and brutally murdered an Armenian citizen and tried to inform the Azerbaijani side about this incident as well as about his intention to kill many other Armenian civilians. We are sure that after these recent statements of the President of Azerbaijan, the international community can not have any doubts about the fact that this as well as the above-mentioned crimes were organised at the state level.

Instead of looking for sustainable and lasting solutions to the problems that have accumulated in the region for years, Azerbaijan is trying to advance its maximalist claims through the use of force and threats of the use of force. The Armenian side has repeatedly warned about the destabilising prospects of this policy conducted by Azerbaijan and drew the attention of the international community to the dangers of such behaviour and actions against the world order based on international law.”