Day: December 4, 2023

A soldier of the Armenian Army was fatally shot by Azerbaijani forces on Monday in the military position near the Bardzruni village in the Vayots Dzor Province.

At around 2:35 p.m. local time, Azerbaijani forces opened fire at the Armenian position killing serviceman Gerasim Arakelyan, Armenia’s Defense Ministry reported.

“An investigation is underway to entirely reveal the circumstances of the incident. The Ministry of Defense extends condolences and support to the family, relatives and comrades of the serviceman,” the ministry added.

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement strongly condemning the Azerbaijani attack, which it said is meant to incite new provocations.

“The Azerbaijani side, through provocative actions on the border and rejections of proposals constantly made by various international actors to continue negotiations, tries to impede the peace process and lead it into a deadlock,” the foreign ministry statement said.

“We strongly condemn these actions of the Azerbaijani side aimed at inciting a new escalation, delaying the peace process and bringing it to a deadlock,” added the statement.

The European Union’s representatives to the South Caucasus, Toivo Klaar, was also alarmed by the border incident.

“Worrying report of shootings and death on Armenia-Azerbaijan border,” Klaar wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“EU is constantly engaged with Baku and Yerevan. It is essential that calm prevails on the ground and decisive progress is achieved at the negotiating table,” Klaar wrote. 

YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—France will deliver a total of 50 armored personnel carriers to Armenia as part of growing military ties between the two nations, according to French lawmakers.

The first batch of over two dozen Bastion vehicles apparently bound for Armenia was spotted in the Georgian port of Poti and reported by Azerbaijani media about a month ago. The Armenian Defense Ministry declined to explicitly confirm the delivery.

The APCs manufactured by the French company Arquus were not part of defense contracts signed by French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu and his Armenian counterpart Suren Papikyan during the latter’s visit to Paris in late October.

One of those deal calls for Armenia’s purchase of three air-defense radar systems from the French defense group Thales. Lecornu and Papikyan also signed a “letter of intent” on the future delivery of Mistral short-range surface-to-air missiles.

In a joint report on a French budgetary bill, two members of France’s Senate revealed that “24 Bastion-type armored vehicles … are being delivered to Armenia and they should be joined by 26 other vehicles of the same type currently in production.”

The senators, Hugues Saury and Helene Conway-Mouret, said French arms supplies to Armenia should not be confined to “defensive” equipment.

“This distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is not very practical in reality, as has been demonstrated by the war in Ukraine. Let us not repeat the same mistakes by belatedly delivering equipment that could be necessary right from the beginning,” says their report submitted to the French upper house of parliament late last month.

Saury and Conway-Mouret indicated in this regard that Yerevan wants to acquire French artillery systems as well. Paris should therefore consider providing 155-milimeter CAESAR self-propelled howitzers to the Armenian military, they said.

Azerbaijan condemned the French-Armenian arms deals earlier in November, saying that they will “bolster Armenia’s military potential and its ability to carry out destructive operations in the region.”

Armenian officials countered that Yerevan’s arms acquisitions are a response to an Azerbaijani military build-up which has continued even after the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. They argued that Azerbaijan’s military budget is three times bigger than Armenia’s. Israeli media reported around the same time that Baku has purchased more Israeli Barak air-defense systems in a deal worth as much as $1.2 billion.

In the past several months, Azerbaijani cargo planes have reportedly carried out dozens of more flights to and from Israel’s only airfield through which explosives can be flown into and out of the country. According to the Haaretz daily, the frequency of such flights spiked in the run-up to Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Karabakh.

Communication has been established successfully with Armenia’s Hayasat-1 satellite that was launched into space on Friday, the Bazoomq Space Research Lab announced Sunday.

“The first satellite created in independent Armenia has been in space for 3 days. We are happy to announce that we are successfully tracking our Hayasat-1 CubeSat-format satellite. It is operational and transmitting its periodic signals. In the next phase, we will move forward as planned. Congratulations to the team and all our supporters. P.S. Hayasat-1 was created by Bazoomq and the Center for Scientific Innovation and Education,” an official statement said.

Hayasat-1 satellite was sent into space by the SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, Calif.

All the development, creation, and programming of Hayasat-1, the first of its kind developed in Armenia, were done in Armenia. The project was launched in January 2022.

The Hayasat-1 satellite is a small, one-unit CubeSat satellite. It is equipped with solar panels, sensors measuring the intensity of light coming from different directions, magnetometers acting as a compass for the satellite, magnetic converters that dampen the satellite’s rotations, various modules (power supply and communication modules and on-board computer) with sensors measuring the temperatures of the most critical parts, as well as inertial sensors measuring changes in orientation.

Also, the satellite has a secondary payload that will provide data on the satellite’s rotations, position, and motion. It consists of a GPS receiver with its antennas and an experimental inertial measurement unit developed and built in Armenia, which performs better on Earth than similar devices used in CubeSats, which is why it was installed on Hayasat-1 in order to test in space conditions.

The two-way communication with Hayasat-1 will be carried out through the ground station located in the Bazoomq area.

Azerbaijan is seeking to reinvigorate its energy cooperation with the European Union, the country’s energy minister said from the World Climate Summit currently underway in Dubai.

Parviz Shahbazov, Azerbaijan’s energy minister, said that he met with EU’s Energy Commissioner Kadri Simon in Dubai, where he held “fruitful discussions on the Southern Gas Corridor and the Green Energy Corridor, other priorities of our energy dialogue.”

“We agreed to update the road map regarding the implementation of the Azerbaijan-EU Strategic Energy Partnership document,” Shahbazov added in a post on X.

The Azerbaijani official also met with Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources.

“We discussed reducing the methane emissions and establishing the Caspian-EU Green Energy Corridor and a power bridge between Central Asia and Europe via Azerbaijan,” Shahbazov added.

In July, 2022, the European Commission signed a memorandum of understanding with Azerbaijan to double imports of Azerbaijani natural gas to at least 20 billion cubic meters a year by 2027.