YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—The Russian owner of Armenia’s largest gold mine has indicated that it will not restart open-pit operations there because of continuing cross-border fire from nearby Azerbaijani army positions.
The Sotk mine, which employs more than 700 people and is located on the volatile border with Azerbaijan, has stood idle since an upsurge in skirmishes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in mid-April. Its employees say that they have repeatedly come under fire and been evacuated after trying to return to work.
Fighting at that section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border escalated on May 11-12, involving exchanges of artillery fire and resulting in several casualties from both sides.
“The situation of constant danger for the employees of the enterprise persists for more than a month,” read a statement released by the mine operator, GPM Gold, late on Tuesday. “As a consequence, further work of the Sotk open pit has become impossible due to circumstances beyond the Company’s control.”
The subsidiary of Russia’s GeoProMining group added that it has therefore decided to “stop the operation of the open-pit mine” and put its workers on unpaid leave.
Hovannes Harutiunyan, an Armenian deputy minister of local government and infrastructures, predicted GPM Gold’s decision earlier this month. Harutiunyan told lawmakers in Yerevan that the company plans to switch to underground mining due to the periodical border clashes and Azerbaijani gunfire targeting its open-pit facilities.
The GPM Gold statement said nothing about that, however. Nor did it shed light on the uncertain future of GeoProMining’s gold smelter located in Ararat, a town 50 kilometers south of Yerevan.
The company already lost control over a large part of the mountainous area’s gold deposits following the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh and the resulting Armenian withdrawal from the Kelbajar district bordering Sotk. This appears to explain why total taxes paid by it plummeted from 20.8 billion drams ($53 million) in 2021 to just 3.2 billion drams in 2022.
