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References to the issues of the number of Western Armenians and the ratio of Armenians to other ethnic groups in Western Armenia on the eve of the Armenian Genocide occupy a special place in the context of processes related to drafting a peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire and Armenia's delineation after WWI. These issues were tackled by diverse Armenian offi cial and non-offi cial organizations struggling for the formation of an integral Armenian state, as well as Turkish authorities manipulating, inter alia, also demographic arguments against the Armenian claim for Western Armenia1 and the Entente Powers (particularly the United States of America and Great Britain) needing statistical data for deciding the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In the post-war processes the long-distance controversy of the Armenian and Turkish sides over the issues in question can be fi guratively characterized as one of the stages -"battles" of the "statistical war" that emerged after 1878, i.e. following the entry of the Armenian Question into the international diplomatic agenda. This article aims to present and analyse the statistics on the number of Western Armenians and the ratio of Armenians in Western Armenia to other ethnic groups on the eve of the Armenian Genocide presented by Armenian and Turkish delegations at Paris Peace Conference, as well as data circulated by the US and British diplomacy. It will try to explain the connection between the delineation of Armenia and the number of Western Armenians, the demographic composition of Western Armenia on the eve of the Armenian Genocide. The calculations of the number of Western Armenians have had a certain effect on deliberations around demarcation of the border between the Republic of Armenia and the Ottoman Empire in the context of post-war world regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present and analyze data provided by censuses of the Ottoman Armenians from Van, Erzeroum and Bitlis provinces, who, fleeing the threat of massacre during WWI, found refuge in the territory of the Russian Empire, particularly in the Russian Transcaucasia. By comparing data on the Armenian refugees with information provided by other statistical sources, particularly the Armenian patriarchate and the Ottoman government, it is possible to enrich our knowledge of the numbers of Armenian population in Western Armenia and the Ottoman Empire in general on the eve of WWI and the Armenian Genocide. It is shown that the number of refugees is about 70% higher than the number of the Armenian population for the same areas before WWI mentioned in the official Ottoman statistics and corresponds approximately to the figures of the Armenian patriarchate. If account is taken that some people were already dead by the time the refugee censuses were carried out and also that the populations of some settlements within the administrative units in question were not evacuated at all but massacred, then the actual number of the Armenian population in these areas was even higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]