Azerbaijan reports fresh attacks by Armenian forces on border region

The ministry announced in a statement late on Tuesday that its positions in the Heydarabad settlement in the Sadarak area of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic had come under small arms fire from Armenia’s Vedi region across the border.

It added in its statement that Armenian armed detachments also fired at Azerbaijani army positions near Susha in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

It said Azerbaijani units took “adequate” retaliatory measures.

Baku and Yerevan are embroiled in a decades-long territorial dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, over which they have fought two wars.

Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan though it is mostly populated by ethnic Armenians that have resisted Azerbaijani rule since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

In 2020, the second Karabakh war broke out, which claimed the lives of more than 6,500 people on both sides during a six-week conflict. The war ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire deal that saw Armenia handing over swathes of the Azerbaijani territory that it had been holding for several decades. Moscow also dispatched a thousand-strong peacekeeping contingent to the region.

Both sides routinely trade accusations over ceasefire violations.

Azerbaijan last month installed a checkpoint at the entry to the Lachin Corridor – the only road linking Armenia to Karabakh – in a move that Yerevan said was a “gross violation” of the 2020 ceasefire.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev have held several meetings, separately arranged by Russia, the European Union and the United States, as they seek to resolve their dispute.

Peace talks appeared to be making progress in recent weeks, with Pashinyan expressing his country’s readiness to recognize Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.

Armen Grigoryan, Secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, said during a Sunday interview with the country’s Armenia 1 public broadcaster on June 4 that Yerevan and Baku may sign a peace treaty to end the decades-old conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh by the end of the current year.

“Negotiations are going very intensively, if we maintain this intensity and there is strong support from the international community to achieve progress, then there is a chance to have a peace agreement by the end of the year,” he said at the time.