Armenia could face war with Azerbaijan if it does not compromise with Baku and return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in a video released on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Nikol Pashinyan made the remarks during a meeting Monday with residents of border areas in the Tavush region of northern Armenia, near a number of abandoned Azerbaijani villages that Yerevan has controlled since the early 1990s, News.ro reports.

The four villages, which have been uninhabited for more than 30 years, are of strategic importance to Armenia as they are located along the main road between Yerevan and the Georgian border.

Azerbaijan has said the return of its territories, which include several tiny enclaves completely surrounded by Armenian territory, is a necessary precondition for a peace deal to end the three-decade conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which forces from Baku recaptured last September.

Russia’s state news agency TASS quoted Pashinyan as telling residents in a video released by his government that failure to reach a compromise over the disputed villages could lead to war with Azerbaijan “by the end of the week.”

“I know how such a war would end,” he added.

Peace treaty

Yerevan suffered a major defeat last September when Azerbaijani forces retook Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive, prompting nearly all of the region’s roughly 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.

Although Karabakh is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory, ethnic Armenians in the region have enjoyed de facto independence from Baku since a war in the early 1990s.

Baku and Yerevan have said they now want to sign a formal peace treaty, but talks have stalled over issues such as the demarcation of their shared 1,000-kilometer border, which remains closed and heavily militarized.

In recent weeks, Pashinyan has made it clear that he is ready to return territories controlled by Armenia to Azerbaijan and has proposed rerouting Armenia’s road network to avoid Azerbaijani territory.

In addition, Muslim Azerbaijan continues to control territories internationally recognized as part of Christian Armenia.

Stoltenberg in Baku and Yerevan

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said Sunday that his country is “closer than ever” to peace with Armenia, in remarks made after talks with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Baku.

On Tuesday, Stoltenberg held talks with Pashinyan in Armenia, a traditional ally of Russia, although its relations with Moscow have soured in recent months and Yerevan has accused Russia of failing to protect it from Azerbaijan. As a result, Armenia has turned its foreign policy toward the West, much to the chagrin of Moscow, and senior officials have speculated that Armenia may one day apply to join the European Union.

In a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested that Yerevan’s deepening ties with the West were the reason Armenia made concessions to Azerbaijan.