The Environmental Protection First (EPF) coalition has issued a statement in connection with France's placement of uranium-containing radioactive waste in the territories of Armenia close to the conditional border with Azerbaijan, EDnews reports.
The statement says that the coalition members consider the placement of part of the radioactive waste containing uranium by the French nuclear giant Orano in the areas adjacent to the conditional border of Armenia with Azerbaijan as a new environmental war against Azerbaijan. According to French media, this process began in June 2025, the first part of the nuclear waste has already been placed on the territory of the Dilijan National Park of Armenia.
The park, located north of Lake Goycha, is entirely within the Agstafa River basin, which flows into the Kura, at an altitude of 1,100-2,800 m. Since the park's territory is close to the Gadabay, Tovuz, Aghstafa and Gazakh districts, the biodiversity of the entire Azerbaijan is at risk. French media investigations show that the export of uranium-containing radioactive waste to Armenia was agreed upon at a meeting between Macron and Pashinyan in Paris in February this year, after which suspicious donations from a French company were transferred to the account of Pashinyan's wife Anna Hakobyan's My Step Foundation as a reward for this deal.
The placement of nuclear waste in a seismically active region of Armenia further increases the scale of the danger.
After France, which owns 56 nuclear reactors at 18 nuclear power plants, dumped nuclear waste in the seas of its colonial regions, now its transportation to Armenia should raise concerns around the world, including the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"We also call on environmental organizations in Armenia to rise up to stop this environmental terror. The challenge that the France-Armenia tandem is throwing down to the requirements of the Espoo Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Helsinki Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes must end. The Armenian authorities call the information disseminated in the French media "disinformation", but do not allow us to verify the facts on the ground. We, the Environmental Protection First (EPF) Coalition, call on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to create conditions for monitoring radioactive waste in the regions of Armenia bordering Azerbaijan with the participation of Azerbaijani NGOs, representatives of the IAEA and other international organizations," reads the statement.
