The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said that its units entered the Kielbaarya district on November 25.
“Engineering has been completed to ensure that our units move in this direction, and the difficult mountain roads in our force movement route have been cleared of mines and ready for use,” the ministry said in a statement.
On November 20, Azerbaijani army units entered the first of the three Nagorno-Karabakh districts returned by Armenia – Agdam district.
The Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire agreement of 9 November stipulates that the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies will remain in the final stages of the escalation of the conflict, which means that the southern part of Nagorno-Karabakh’s main territory and the entire southern buffer zone will remain under Azerbaijani control.
All security buffer zones currently under Armenian control must also be handed over to Azerbaijan by 1 December.
By November 20, Armenia had to abandon the Agdam district and by December 1, the Lachin district. It was originally planned to abandon the Kielbajara district by 15 November, but this deadline was extended to 25 November.
Armenian Prime Minister Nicholas Pashinyan has explained that he has adopted a tripartite statement with Russian and Azerbaijani leaders on a ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh to avoid a complete collapse, siege and death of thousands of Armenian soldiers in the region.
Intense fighting resumed in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on September 27.
There have been hostile relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the 1990s, when there was a war over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian population.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which was part of the Azerbaijani SSR during the Soviet era, has been de facto independent Republic of Armenia. Although Azerbaijan did not control Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the USSR, it considered the Armenian region to be its territory. Nagorno-Karabakh is also considered by the international community to be part of Azerbaijan, and no country has recognized the region as an independent state.
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