YEREVAN, Sept 17 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Armenia and Azerbaijan said that more than 210 people died in border clashes this week, with Yerevan accusing Baku troops of atrocities in the arch foes’ worst fighting in two years.
The Caucasus neighbours have fought two wars — in 2020 and in the 1990s — over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated enclave.
Both sides accuse each other of provoking the clashes, which erupted on Tuesday and ended with international mediation overnight on Thursday.
On Friday, Azerbaijan’s defence ministry revised the death toll among its troops to 77 from an earlier reported 71.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said: “For the moment, the number of dead is 135.”
“Unfortunately, it is not the final figure. There are also many wounded,” he told a cabinet meeting.
Armenia’s rights ombudsperson, Kristina Grigoryan, later said one civilian was also killed and six wounded in shelling by Azerbaijani forces, while hundreds of civilians fled their homes.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said “the fact that the ceasefire is being respected proves that neither Azerbaijan, nor Armenia, intended for large-scale escalation”.
Speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, Aliyev thanked him for Moscow’s “rapid reaction to the escalation”.
Putin, for his part, expressed satisfaction the ceasefire was holding, but noted the overall “situation remains tense”.
It was the worst fighting since the two countries fought a six-week war in 2020 and comes with Armenia’s closest ally Moscow distracted by its nearly seven-month war in Ukraine.
Armenia’s security council said the violence ended late Thursday “thanks to international mediation” after earlier failed attempts by Moscow to broker a truce.
With Moscow increasingly isolated on the world stage following its February invasion of Ukraine, the European Union had taken a lead role in mediating the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalisation process.
The six weeks of fighting in 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6,500 troops from both sides and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives. — NNN-AGENCIES
