Armenia on Wednesday lambasted Azerbaijan accusing it of killing one of its soldiers in a fresh border shootout which ensued yesterday between the arch-foe Caucasus countries locked in a crisis caused by a decades-long territorial dispute.
Africa Today News, New York reports that over the last few months, there have been frequent reports of shootouts along their shared border since the end of the 2020 war between Yerevan and Baku over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Armenia’s defence ministry in a statement said; ‘On Monday evening, an Armenian serviceman was fatally wounded as a result of enemy fire at the eastern section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border’.
Azerbaijan’s defence ministry, had also gone on to accuse Armenian troops of initiating a border shootout in the evening, saying ‘Armenia’s military-political leadership is responsible for the latest escalation.’
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Africa Today News, New York recalls that in early August, tensions flared as Azerbaijan said it had lost a soldier and the Karabakh army said two of its troops had been killed and more than a dozen injured.
The neighbours fought two wars — in the 1990s and in 2020 — over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated enclave.
Six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades and Moscow deployed some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
During EU-mediated talks in Brussels in May and April, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to “advance discussions” on a future peace treaty.
Following its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, an increasingly isolated Moscow lost its status as the primary mediator in the conflict.
The European Union has since led the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalisation process, which involves peace talks, border delimitation and the reopening of transport links.
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.