“Azerbaijan violated a ceasefire overnight” using mortars to shell ethnic Armenian rebel positions in Karabakh, the separatist defense ministry said in a statement, adding that two soldiers were killed.
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The fighting this week was the most intense since a 1994 ceasefire that stopped the conflict but did not resolve the underlying dispute. That conflict left Nagorno-Karabakh, officially a part of Azerbaijan, under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military.
The declaration follows agreements on a cease-fire brokered by the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides on Tuesday.
Initially, the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh began in 1988, when the Armenian-dominated autonomous region sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, before proclaiming independence after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Here Medvedev emphasized that he will participate in the settlement process in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev traveled to Azerbaijan’s capital Friday for talks with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev.
“Dmitry Anatolievich, I’m sure you know that the fact that the Azerbaijanis used in full weapons that they acquired in Russian Federation recently has had a lot of resonance in Armenia”, Sarkisian reportedly told Medvedev during the meeting.
World leaders have urged Baku and Yerevan to refrain from further violence and to step up efforts aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the protracted conflict.
That ceasefire was shattered over the weekend, and dozens of people were killed. The defense ministries of Azerbaijan and Armenia announced a ceasefire on the contact line as of 12:00 (11:00 Moscow time) the same day. “Certainly, this can not but alarm us”, he said. “We are not going to give up our territories and will never allow the establishment of the second Armenian state on Azerbaijani soil”, Aliyev said.
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U.S., French, and Russian mediators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will meet Sargsyan and Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandyan in Yerevan on Saturday, the Armenian Foreign Ministry said on Twitter. We hope the peace will prevail, then we can continue to live here.
