OREANDA-NEWS. The United States should provide assistance to the republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been hit by a humanitarian crisis. This opinion was expressed by Senior Democrat of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate of the US Congress Bob Menendez (from the state of New Jersey) and Senator Rob Portman (Republican from Ohio State) in a joint statement, which was released by the press office of Menendez.

They called on the Appropriations Committee of the upper house of the American legislature to allocate funds as part of the bill for fiscal 2021 to resolve the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the South Caucasus. Menendez and Portman highlighted the gravity of the crisis and the critical importance of American aid. The humanitarian situation in the South Caucasus is terrible, they said, and as winter approaches, it will get worse. They cite as an example the spread of the coronavirus, as well as the recent Turkish-supported conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which caused long-term damage to the infrastructure of the region and led to the displacement of more than half of the ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.