NewsRescue
Early Thursday, Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers shelled one other’s posts in the border area, with both sides reporting wounded among their personnel.
Armenia said that about 6:00 a.m. local time (2:00 a.m. GMT), the Azerbaijani military conducted an artillery and mortar attack on its personnel near the village of Sotk.
The shelling lasted several hours and injured at least three Armenian personnel, according to the country’s defense ministry, which added that it would provide an update on their status later. It also accused Azerbaijan of attacking an ambulance that was transporting one of the wounded servicemen.
According to the ministry, “the units of the Armenian Armed Forces are taking appropriate preventive and defense measures” in reaction to the neighboring country’s actions. Other locations near the border between the two former Soviet republics are “stable,” it noted.
Meanwhile, Baku said it was responding to an attack by Armenian forces late on Wednesday, in which an Azerbaijani soldier was seriously injured due to “intense shelling.” This claim has been rejected by Yerevan.
The other side of the border continued to fire mortars and artillery on Thursday morning, according to Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry, which added that it was taking “the necessary countermeasures.”
Armenia has engaged in “a deliberate provocation” and has “once again violated the ceasefire,” according to the ministry.
Despite the escalation, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that he will still fly to Brussels on Sunday to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. He did, however, state that the chances of a peace treaty being signed during the conference were “very low,” as the draft treaty still needed polishing.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at odds for decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan with a majority ethnic Armenian population that declared independence from Baku in the early 1990s. The two neighbors fought a 44-day war for control of the territory in 2020, which ended in a truce brokered and monitored by Russia.