Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, fought two wars, the first in the early 1990s and the second in 2020.
Fresh clashes erupted at the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Friday, for the second day in a row, causing tension and threatening talks scheduled for this weekend between the leaders of the two countries located in the Caucasus.
And the Armenian Ministry of Defense announced, in a statement, that the Azerbaijani armed forces “targeted with heavy weapons Armenian positions near the village of Kot” in the border region of Ggarkonik.
The ministry had confirmed earlier that the Azerbaijani army “violated the ceasefire towards Sotak (Armenian border town) using drones.”
It added that “two soldiers of the Armenian armed forces were wounded”, one of whom was in critical condition.
Azerbaijani response
For its part, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense accused the Armenian forces of having “opened fire with mortars on Azerbaijani positions” at the border between the two countries.
An Azerbaijani soldier was killed Thursday and four Armenian soldiers were wounded in clashes at the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, who have been fighting over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region for three decades.
The clashes come ahead of a meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels on Sunday for talks sponsored by the European Union.
Pashinyan accused Azerbaijan Thursday of seeking to “undermine the talks” scheduled in Brussels, stressing that there is a “very little” chance of reaching a peace agreement with Aliyev during this meeting.
He explained that the draft agreement “is still in a preliminary stage and it is too early to talk about the possibility of signing it.”
In early May, Washington hosted four days of intensive talks between two delegations from the two countries.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, fought two wars, the first in the early 1990s and the second in 2020, with the aim of controlling the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is inhabited by an Armenian majority and unilaterally separated from Azerbaijan three decades ago.
After a lightning war in which Baku seized lands in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the fall of 2020, Baku and Yerevan signed a ceasefire mediated by Moscow.
Since then, Russian soldiers have been deployed to supervise compliance with the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh, but Armenia has been complaining for months about their ineffectiveness.
