Who supplies Azerbaijan and Armenia with arms? Sources of arm supply. "Location"

Within the framework of the "Location" project, "Voice of America" addressed the topic of supplying arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan before and after the 44-day war, relying on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report and expert assessments.

We never supply arms to regions where such supplies could destabilize the situation, be it the Transcaucasus, the Middle East, or any other part of the planet. In August 2010, during the "Real Politics" program of the Public Television of Armenia, the author of this statement was the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

However, a study published in 2021 by the prestigious Stockholm-based International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) documents that in 2011-2020, Russia was the largest supplier of weapons to Azerbaijan and Armenia.

According to the institute, although Moscow acted as a mediator in the Karabakh conflict with the co-chairing countries of the OSCE Minsk Group, France and the USA, Russia accounted for 60% of Azerbaijan's military-technical imports in 2011-2020, and 94% for Armenia. During that time, other important suppliers of Azerbaijan were Israel, Belarus and Turkey.

SIPRI's report highlights that neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan had a tangible military-industrial complex, and both depended on external suppliers to expand and develop their own arsenals.

According to the research, if in 2020 the allocations of the military sector of Armenia amounted to 634 million dollars, to Azerbaijan - more than 2.2 billion. In 2020, Armenia's military expenditures were about 5% of the country's GDP, and in the case of Azerbaijan, about 5.5%. Despite this relative equality in terms of percentage, the volume of arms imports by the parties was highly disproportionate. In 2011-2020, Azerbaijan imported more than 8 times more weapons than Armenia.

In 1992, responding to the Nagorno-Karabakh armed conflict, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called on its member states to impose an embargo on supplying arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan. This OSCE request has not been revoked, but it is a voluntary multilateral arms embargo, so a number of OSCE participating countries have supplied arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1992.

"It's a voluntary embargo, so at the moment there's really no legal obstacle to supplying arms to the parties," claims expert Peter Wezeman, co-author of the report.

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