`Gagik Tsarukyan` fund to provide financial aid to over 200 Armenian refugees from Artsakh
ArmInfo. The charitable foundation of renowned Armenian businessman Gagik Tsarukyan will provide financial support to the "Artsakh in My Heart" social and charitable foundation to cover the utility bills of 238 Artsakh families for December, January, and February, who became refugees as a result of the Azerbaijani aggression in 2023.
As reported by the businessman's press service, Iveta Tonoyan, on her Facebook page, this decision was made in response to an appeal from Nzhdeh Iskandaryan, co-founder of the "Artsakh in My Heart" social and charitable foundation, to Gagik Tsarukyan requesting urgent assistance to certain groups of Artsakh residents who have found themselves in extremely difficult social situations due to the inability to cover utility costs. "This concerns covering the utility costs of 238 Artsakh families of those killed and missing in the explosion at the fuel depot in Stepanakert, as well as 22 families of civilians killed as a result of Azerbaijani aggression on September 19-20, 2023. Since this issue is of paramount importance and requires an urgent solution, the businessman instructed representatives of the Gagik Tsarukyan Charitable Foundation to urgently address this issue," Tonoyan wrote.
As a reminder, on September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan, under the pretext of an "anti-terrorist operation," initiated a large-scale aggression against Artsakh, which led to the complete de-Armenization of the NKR. This was preceded by a nearly 10-month blockade of the unrecognized republic. Since the enemy aggression that began in the fall of 2020, which culminated in the complete ethnic cleansing of Artsakh in September 2023, over 150,000 Artsakh residents have lost their homeland and become refugees. It should be added that in October 2023, Armenia launched a program allocating 40,000 drams (approximately $100) per month to cover housing costs for each family expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, along with an additional 10,000 drams for utilities.
However, in November 2024, the authorities announced that the program's terms would be revised. As a result, only minor citizens of Artsakh, as well as those officially unable to work for various reasons, remained beneficiaries of the government program.