Elmar Abdullayev, 55, stands at a gates of his home hit by shelling in a village of Gapinli, in Terter region of Azerbaijan on Tuesday, April 5, 2016.
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Azerbaijan is “seriously” abiding by the truce, though its forces fired 120 times in response to 115 Armenian violations that included artillery strikes in the past 24 hours, the Defense Ministry in Baku said Wednesday on its website.
Both countries blamed each other for the latest hostilities, though at least one observer believes that Azerbaijan’s military unleashed an offensive aiming to seize some ground to make Armenia more likely to discuss a compromise in peace talks.
“On April 5, the chiefs of defense of the two countries met in Moscow and reached a ceasefire agreement,”Armenia’s Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan announced at a government meeting on Wednesday”. The ministry accused Armenian forces of breaking the truce on several occasions Wednesday by firing mortars at Azerbaijani positions, adding that Azerbaijani forces hasn’t returned fire.
The landlocked territory, which is located in the Azerbaijan Republic but is populated by Armenians, has been under control of local ethnic Armenian militia and the Armenian troops since a three-year war, which claimed over 30,000 lives, ended between the two sides in 1994 through mediation by Russian Federation. Turkey closed the border with Armenia in the early 1990s over the conflict, giving Armenia land access to the outside world only through Georgia and Iran.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry reported isolated firing from the Armenian side but said its forces were “strictly abiding by the ceasefire agreement” hammered out on Tuesday, April 5, by the Azerbaijani and Armenian army chiefs during a meeting in Moscow.
The violence in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region with a predominantly Armenian population, escalated on Saturday. Armenians took over Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions districts from Azerbaijan in the 1991-1994 conflict. Azerbaijan officially put the number of its casualties at 31. The Karabakh military said Tuesday that 29 of its soldiers have been killed and another 101 wounded in fighting since the weekend.
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Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stressed the need to ensure a strict implementation of the cease-fire and the resumption of efforts to seek a political settlement in a telephone conversation with his Armenian counterpart, Hovik Abrahamyan, on Tuesday. Fighting between Armenia, a Russian ally, and Azerbaijan, which has stronger ties to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member Turkey, would also potentially disrupt a new energy corridor between central Asia and Europe. Armenia says the enclave’s Christian Armenians, who declared independence from largely-Muslim Azerbaijan in 1991, have the right to self-determination.
