If Yerevan does not meet Baku's demands for the return of the border villages of Azerbaijan, which Armenia considers its territory, war may break out, Armenian Prime Minister Nikola Pashinyan said.

Our task is to have a border that will become a barrier from an international point of view and de jure, and shooting at this border will not be accepted. We will build roads, we will provide the (residents of the border villages) with everything they need. Where necessary we will pay an additional fee. But I want to describe another scenario. We can get out of here. This means that the war will start by the end of the week, Pashinyan pointed out.

He added that he even knows how such a war will end, i.e. that he will be welcomed at Republic Square in Yerevan, where citizens will criticize him and blame him for his inactivity, even though he had the necessary information, reports RIA Novosti.

Azerbaijan's Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev's press office announced on March 9 that Baku is demanding the release of villages it claims were occupied by Armenia as part of the demarcation process.

At the same time, the Azerbaijani side does not recognize the reports circulating in the Armenian media that allegedly 31 villages are under the occupation of Azerbaijan.

The Armenian authorities believe that during the demarcation it will be necessary to take into account the existence of specific territorial entities, that is, the Armenian enclave of Artsvashen on the territory of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani enclave in Armenia.

The RIA Novosti agency recalls that as a result of the inter-ethnic confrontation in the early 1990s, both sides in the conflict annexed these enclaves and replaced their original population with settlers of other ethnic origin.

Pashinyan believes that this proposal of Azerbaijan is unacceptable because of the roads that pass through the Armenian enclave and connect the capital Yerevan with Iran and Georgia.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev recently stated that the Azerbaijani side does not want a war with Armenia, and full control over Azerbaijani territory is the sovereign right of the government in Baku.

Commenting on Pashinyan's statement, the spokeswoman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, informed that the latest tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan is the result of Yerevan's consultations with the West and is therefore not related to Russia in any way.