TBILISI (Reuters) – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that Armenia may face a war with Azerbaijan if it does not compromise with Baku on returning some strategic Azerbaijani territories that Armenia has controlled since the early 1990s.

Pashinyan was speaking during a Monday meeting with residents of border areas in northern Armenia’s Tavush region, close to a string of deserted Azerbaijani villages that Yerevan has controlled since the opening phases of the countries’ three decade-long conflict in the early 1990.

TASS quoted Pashinyan as saying in a video of the meeting circulated by his government: “Now we can leave here, let’s go and tell [Azerbaijan] that no, we are not going to do anything. This means that at the end of the week a war will begin.”

Pashinyan has repeatedly signalled in recent weeks that he is willing to return the villages to Azerbaijan, which are important for Yerevan, as they control its main road northwards to the border with Georgia.

Azerbaijan has said that the return of its lands is a necessary precondition for a peace deal to end three decades of conflict over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan retook in September.

The two sides have said they want to sign a formal peace treaty, but talks have become bogged down in issues including demarcation of the countries’ 1000km (620 mile) border, which is closed and heavily militarised.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan continue to occupy lands that are internationally recognised as part of the other’s territory.

(Reporting by Felix Light in Tbilisi and Nailia Bagirova in Baku; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman/Guy Faulconbridge)