Senior Biden administration officials were to arrive in Armenia on Monday, a U.S. official told Reuters, after ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh began a mass exodus on Sunday following Azerbaijan's defeat of the breakaway region's fighters in a conflict dating from the Soviet era, Reuters reports.
The visit by U.S. Agency for International Development chief Samantha Power and U.S. State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Yuri Kim would be the first by senior U.S. officials to Armenia since a ceasefire last week.
Power will be the first USAID Administrator to go to Armenia, the official said, and will affirm the U.S. partnership with the country and "express deep concern for the ethnic Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and to discuss measures to address the humanitarian crisis there."
The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani military.
