Yerevan – AFP
Clashes renewed at the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, on Friday, for the second day in a row, causing tension and threatening the talks scheduled for this weekend between the leaders of the two countries located in the Caucasus.
And the Armenian Ministry of Defense announced in a statement that the Azerbaijani armed forces “targeted with heavy weapons Armenian positions near the village of Kot” in the border region of Ggarkonik. The ministry had confirmed earlier that the Azerbaijani army “violated the ceasefire towards Sotik, an Armenian border town, using drones.” It added that “two soldiers of the Armenian armed forces were wounded,” one of whom was in critical condition.
For its part, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense accused the Armenian forces of having “opened fire with mortars on Azerbaijani positions” at the border between the two countries. An Azerbaijani soldier was killed Thursday, and four Armenian soldiers were wounded in clashes at the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region for three decades.
-The clashes come ahead of a meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels on Sunday for talks sponsored by the European Union.
-On Thursday, Pashinyan accused Azerbaijan of seeking to “undermine the talks” scheduled in Brussels, stressing that there is a “very small” chance of reaching a peace agreement with Aliyev during this meeting. He explained that the draft agreement “is still in a preliminary stage, and it is too early to talk about the possibility of signing it.”
In early May, Washington hosted four days of intensive talks between two delegations from the two countries.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars, the first in the early 1990s and the second in 2020, with the aim of controlling the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is inhabited by an Armenian majority, and unilaterally separated from Azerbaijan three decades ago.
