Since 1993, Armenian militia have occupied the Karabakh region, which was referred as being part of Azerbaijan in three UN Security Council resolutions (853, 874 and 884) and UN General Assembly resolutions 19/13 and 57/298. The regional economic downturn and ongoing tensions between Russian Federation and Turkey only add to the conflict’s volatility. BP’s oil pipeline which carried 720,000 barrels per day from Baku to the Mediterranean past year runs fewer than 30 miles from the conflict zone at one point. Amid intense global diplomacy to avert a full-scale war, Sargsyan held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Yerevan on Friday.
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Two ethnic Armenian soldiers have been killed in a new upsurge in fighting between Azerbaijani forces and separatists from the breakaway region of Nagorny Karabakh, the separatist statelet said on Tuesday.
The Armenians claimed in a series of official statements to the press that Azerbaijan’s artillery intentionally targeted Armenian military positions as well as civilian settlements in Karabakh’s northeastern towns of Martakert and Mataghis.
He said that Mammadov was operated on and at the moment his condition is assessed as fair.
“If there are no negotiations, how can Russian forces appear in Karabakh or between Azeri and Karabakh forces?”
It pointed out in a statement that “in accordance with operational situation, the Azerbaijani armed forces inflicted retaliatory strikes on military facilities of Armenian army”.
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The resident of the Afetli village of Azerbaijan’s Aghdam district, Elnur Mammadov, wounded in the Armenian shelling on the night of April 28, continues his treatment in the district’s central hospital, chief of the hospital’s medical staff Bakhtiyar Akhverdiyev told Trend Apr. 30. Armenia’s defense budget rose threefold over the same period to $447 million, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Armenia also requires “assurances that these kinds of violations will not happen again”, he said.
