Siranush Sahakian said those prisoners claimed to have tried to take their lives in phone calls with their families in Armena. She refused to name them, saying only that they do not include any of the eight former political and military leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh standing trial in Azerbaijan.
“There were such repeated attempts after Red Cross visits [of the prisoners] stopped,” Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
The Azerbaijani authorities until recently allowed representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to periodically to visit the Armenian prisoners to inspect their detention conditions, inquire about their health and arrange phone calls between them and their families. They most recently did so in June.
The ICRC will likely no longer have such exclusive access after being forced to end its mission in Azerbaijan on Wednesday. The Azerbaijani government announced plans to close its office in Baku early this year.
“The ICRC will continue to engage with the Azerbaijani authorities to support persons protected under international humanitarian law (IHL) in line with our mandate and the country’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions,” the Geneva-based organization said in a statement released on Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, joined by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, speaks during a trilateral signing ceremony at the White House, August 8, 2025.
Prospects for the release anytime soon of the captives remain uncertain even after the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington on August 8. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian at the White House commits Baku to freeing them.
This fact gave more ammunition to Pashinian’s domestic critics who accuse him of doing little to secure the prisoners’ release. Some of them claim that he does not want the former Karabakh leaders, notably Armenian-born billionaire and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, to be freed. Pashinian again denied that following the Washington talks.
Meeting with Pashinian at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump promised to ask Aliyev to free the “23 Christians.” It is still not clear whether Trump has done that.
The Yerevan daily Hraparak reported that in an August 30 phone call with Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Aliyev’s foreign policy aide, Hikmet Hajiyev, said Baku cannot grant Trump’s request. According to the paper, Hajiyev also objected to Yerevan’s use of the phrase “Christian prisoners.” A spokesperson for Grigorian’s office declined to confirm or refute the report on Wednesday.
