Azeri fake news campaign seeks to justify Aliyev’s 'zero trust' statement, says Armenian official

The Azeri military’s fresh disinformation campaign falsely accusing Armenia of border shootings could have been generated in order to justify Azeri leader Ilham Aliyev’s recent statement about “zero trust,” Armenian Speaker of Parliament Alen Simonyan has said.

“No, I don’t think there’s ground for claiming failure,” Simonyan told reporters when asked whether the Azeri false accusations can be considered as a failure of the peace process. “I think it was done to justify the Azerbaijani president’s statement, who said they have near zero trust towards the Armenian side, which itself is surprising for me because our work and conduct, and the logic of the statement about finalizing the treaty speaks about the opposite.”

Simonyan reminded that the Armenian Ministry of Defense denied the Azeri accusations for three times, and the EU monitoring mission also recorded that no shots were fired.

“I suppose this is being done in order to present Aliyev’s ‘zero trust’ statement to their domestic audience,” the Speaker said.

The governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan announced on March 13 that the negotiations around the peace treaty terms have been successfully concluded. The Armenian government has expressed readiness to start discussions with Azerbaijan around the date and location of signing the agreement. Days after the agreement was announced, Azerbaijan launched a massive fake news campaign, falsely accusing Armenia of opening fire across the border.