First border section delimited — the Tavush transfer

What happened

The Armenian and Azerbaijani state commissions agree the first delimited section of their border, roughly a dozen kilometres in the Tavush direction, and Armenia transfers control of four villages held since the 1990s. The commissions record the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration and the Soviet-era administrative maps in force at the time as the baseline for the work. Border markers are placed along the section by geodetic survey, and from 24 May the border services of both states take over its protection. Protests follow in the affected communities and in Yerevan.

The only completed border work in the entire process, and therefore the only evidence that the mechanism functions at all. It established three things the module measures everything since against: that a legal baseline both states accept exists; that delimitation — agreeing a line on a map — proceeds section by section rather than comprehensively; and that its domestic cost in Armenia is immediate, because the baseline consistently applied moves territory away from Armenian control as well as toward it. Delimitation is not demarcation, and this is the one section where both have happened: by the Armenian state news agency's report about forty border markers had been placed on it by 6 May, the commissions' protocol of 16 May described the line between the paired villages, and border guards replaced the army along it from 24 May. No other section has been delimited or marked. The final marker count was not published in a form this record could verify.

Confidence: High