YEREVAN | Armenia and Azerbaijan on Wednesday accused each other of new attacks on their borders, fueling an outbreak of violence that has killed more than 150 people and jeopardizes fragile peace negotiations.
• Read also: At least 100 dead in clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan
These clashes, which erupted overnight from Monday to Tuesday, are the most intense since a war which opposed these two Caucasian countries in 2020, killing more than 6,500 people.
At least 105 Armenian soldiers have been killed, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian announced on Wednesday, far more than the initial death toll of 49 given on Tuesday.
Azerbaijan, which announced 50 soldiers killed in its ranks, offered Wednesday to hand over the bodies of 100 Armenian soldiers to Yerevan, while calling for a ceasefire.
Russia, which considers the Caucasus as its backyard, announced a truce on Tuesday morning, but both sides immediately accused each other of having violated it.
This new deadly outbreak comes as the attention of Moscow, traditional mediator in the region, is monopolized by its military intervention in Ukraine.
The Armenian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that Baku “has resumed its attacks with artillery, mortars and large-caliber weapons in the directions of Jermuk, Verin Shorzha”, two Armenian localities near the Azerbaijani border.
“It was impossible to stay in our houses, because there was already heavy shelling (…). We thought our houses were going to collapse,” Vardanouch Vardanian, 66, a resident of the Armenian village of Sotk, near the border with Azerbaijan, told AFP.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry claimed that Armenian forces had “shelled our positions in the areas of Kelbajar and Lachin during the night”.
Baku also accused Armenian forces of firing howitzers at three Azerbaijani villages. Armenia has denied these accusations.
– “No war, no peace” –
Armenia and Azerbaijan, two rival ex-Soviet republics, have clashed in two wars over the past three decades for control of Nagorny Karabakh, a mountainous region they dispute.
The resumption of such bloody fighting illustrates how explosive the situation remains, both in Nagorny Karabakh and at the official borders between the two countries.
Armenia called on the international community to react, while the European Union, the United States, France, Russia, Iran and Turkey expressed their concern and called for an end to the violence.
The German government also urged Armenia and Azerbaijan on Wednesday to end their conflict which threatens the security of the entire “region”.
Visiting Kazakhstan, Pope Francis said he was “concerned” by the violence in the Caucasus and called for “praying so that in these territories also peaceful confrontation and harmony prevail over quarrels”.
Russia deployed peacekeepers to Nagorny Karabakh in November 2020, but since its offensive in Ukraine, Moscow has been isolated on the international scene and its role as mediator is called into question.
In recent months, the EU has taken the lead in finding a peace agreement. These negotiations have made it possible to make timid progress on the issue of border demarcation and the reopening of transport routes between the two countries.
Armenian leaders Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani Ilham Aliyev have met in Brussels three times this year, most recently on August 31.
But the new clashes “have nullified” the progress made, said Guela Vasadze, a political scientist at the Georgian Center for Strategic Analysis.
Relations between Yerevan and Baku remain poisoned by the question of Nagorny Karabakh, an enclave mainly populated by Armenians who seceded from Azerbaijan with the support of Armenia.
After a first war that left more than 30,000 dead in the early 1990s, Yerevan and Baku clashed again in the fall of 2020, in battles that claimed the lives of more than 6,500 people.
Armenia lost this last war and had to cede important territories. According to Gela Vasadze, the fragile ceasefire reached in 2020 has created an unstable in-between situation: “Neither war nor peace”.