Yerevan /Mediamax/. Ruben Vardanyan’s international lawyer, Jared Genser, said that the release of Armenian prisoners held in Baku is a "top priority” for the new U.S. administration.

“We have been told that their freedom needs to be a precondition for President Trump to ultimately bless a peace deal,” Genser said in a conversation with Catholic News Agency.

“I think that’s a really important development because our biggest fear all along has been that if a peace deal were to proceed, and there was no resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh or of the Armenian Christian POWs, then unfortunately, it could lead to a sacrificing of those prisoners as a part of the peace deal,” the lawyer said.

According to Genser, neither of these critical issues are contained in the current peace deal, nor are they on the bilateral agenda. However, he said there are many things the Trump administration can do to push for these ends.

Genser declined to say what specific methods should be employed to apply pressure on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, though he encouraged the Trump administration to “shock” Azerbaijan’s president, whom he described as a dictator.

“At the end of the day, dictators only release political prisoners when they have to. They never do it because they want to or because they’re magnanimous or humanitarian by orientation. The only way that happens is when the dictator sees the cost of detaining the political prisoner or political prisoners as being dramatically higher than the benefits of detaining them,” the lawyer added.

Genser said peace will not be possible until “all relevant issues have been identified, negotiated, and fully addressed as part of a peace deal itself.”

“A peace deal that leaves unresolved what the future is going to look like for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh and the release of the Armenian Christian POWs is a recipe for future flare-ups, disagreements, and even potential war,” he noted.