YEREVAN —
Armenia and Azerbaijan said
Friday 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.
اضافة اعلان
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she will travel
to Yerevan Saturday after this week’s escalation has largely undone recent
Western efforts to bring Baku and Yerevan closer to a peace agreement.
The Caucasus neighbors 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.
The chief of staff of Armenia’s armed forces, Eduard
Asryan, accused Azerbaijani troops of committing “horrible atrocities”, saying
they mutilated and dismembered the bodies of dead Armenian servicemen.
Aliyev thanks Putin
Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev said “the fact that the ceasefire is being respected proves that neither
Azerbaijan, nor Armenia, intended for large-scale escalation.”
He said he regretted “numerous victims from both
sides”, saying what was “most important now is not to wreck the nascent process
of normalizing ties.”
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.
A delegation of the Collective Security Treaty
Organization (CSTO) — a Moscow-led grouping of ex-Soviet republics — arrived in
Yerevan Thursday evening, Armenia’s defense ministry said.
Armenia is a member of CSTO but Azerbaijan is not.
On Tuesday, Armenia’s security council asked for
military help from Moscow, which is obliged under the treaty to defend Armenia
in the event of a foreign invasion.
But the Kremlin — which also has close ties with
Baku — did not rush to help Yerevan.
“We asked for military help and our demand was not
accepted. Obviously, we are not happy,” Armenia’s security council chairman,
Artyom Grigoryan, said Friday.
Transport sticking point
With Moscow increasingly
isolated on the world stage following its February invasion of Ukraine, the EU
had taken a lead role in mediating the Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization
process.
During EU-mediated talks in Brussels in April and
May, Aliyev and Pashinyan agreed to “advance discussions” on a future peace
treaty.
They last met in Brussels on August 31, for talks
mediated by European Council President Charles Michel.
The talks also focus on border delimitation and the
reopening of transport links.
The issue of ensuring a land transport link between
Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan and its ally Ankara via Armenian territory has
emerged as the primary sticking point.
Azerbaijan insists on Yerevan renouncing its
jurisdiction over the land corridor that should pass along Armenia’s border
with Iran — a demand the Armenian government rejects as an affront to the
country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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.
Under the deal,
Armenia ceded swathes of territory
it had controlled for decades, and Moscow deployed about 2,000 Russian
peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce.
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.
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