By Nailia Bagirova and Lucy Papachristou
BAKU/TBILISI, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born billionaire banker who served as a senior official in the breakaway Armenian administration of Nagorno-Karabakh, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an Azerbaijani court on Tuesday, state media reported.
A Baku military court convicted Vardanyan on 42 charges including terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The United States is making a concerted push for peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, neighbours in the South Caucasus that have fought a series of wars, primarily over Nagorno-Karabakh.
U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration signed economic deals in Yerevan and Baku last week, told Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at a recent White House meeting that he would ask Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to release Armenian prisoners.
However, speaking to France24 this week, Aliyev ruled out pardons for the former Karabakh officials, saying they were guilty of grave crimes.
Vardanyan’s son, David, condemned the verdict as “predetermined” and said he hoped Washington and Yerevan would do more to secure the release of his father and the others.
ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN PEACE PROCESS
“It’s the greatest shame on us as a people if we let our own citizens kind of rot in a jail while trying to advertise a so-called peace agreement,” he told Reuters.
The prison term handed to Vardanyan, Karabakh’s second highest-ranking official in 2022-2023, was more lenient than the life sentence sought by Azerbaijani prosecutors.
It was not immediately clear if he intended to appeal as Reuters was unable to reach his lawyer.
The 57-year-old former banker has gone on hunger strike several times throughout his imprisonment and trial, which his international defence counsel has described as neither free nor fair. Reuters was unable to access the courtroom throughout the trial.
Vardanyan’s family has previously quoted him as saying he does not recognise the proceedings and regrets nothing.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have made steps this year to put to rest the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region within Azerbaijan that escaped Baku’s control in the waning days of the Soviet Union, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris fled their homes.
For the following three decades the region enjoyed de facto independence, governed by an ethnically-Armenian administration that Vardanyan joined in 2022 as state minister.
ARMENIAN BILLIONAIRE’S RUSSIAN INVESTMENT EMPIRE
Born in Yerevan, Vardanyan made his fortune in Russia, setting up one of its first investment banks and founding a business management school in Moscow. Forbes estimates his and his family’s combined wealth at $1.2 billion.
He donated hundreds of millions of dollars to philanthropic efforts in Armenia, later renouncing his Russian citizenship and moving to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Baku casts him and other former separatist officials as leaders of an illegal armed entity. Vardanyan always maintained the right of Karabakh, called Artsakh by Armenians, to exist as an independent state.
He was arrested in September 2023 while attempting to cross into Armenia during a mass exodus of the region’s roughly 120,000 ethnic Armenians after Azerbaijan retook the territory.
(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baku and Lucy Papachristou in Tbilisi. Writing by Lucy Papachristou. Editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Mark Potter and Andrei Khalip)
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