Fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in the South Caucasus flared up again last night.
According to Russian news agencies, citing the Armenian Defense Ministry, Azerbaijani troops attacked Armenian positions in three places with artillery and heavy weapons.
Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry in Baku said the fighting was caused by a large-scale Armenian sabotage attempt, BTA reported.
The Armenian Prime Minister said today that 49 soldiers were killed in Azerbaijan’s night attacks, the Associated Press reported. Azerbaijani forces attacked about half a dozen points, Nikol Pashinyan said in parliament, quoted by Interfax.
The two countries have been in conflict for decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, which historically has a predominantly Armenian population but was legally part of Azerbaijan during the Soviet Union, the DPA noted.
After the collapse of the USSR, Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence from Baku under the name of the Republic of Artsakh with the support of Yerevan, sparking a three-year war. The war ended in 1994 with an Armenian victory and for a quarter of a century Nagorno-Karabakh was effectively under Armenian control, although its status was never recognized internationally.
After decades of stalemate, Azerbaijan suddenly claimed much of Nagorno-Karabakh in a military campaign in 2020, forcing Armenia to make major territorial concessions. They included a clause restricting Armenian access to the region to a safe corridor monitored by Russian peacekeepers. Since then, however, the ceasefire has been violated several times by both sides.
The office of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said it discussed the worsening situation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in telephone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron.
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