Armenia and Azerbaijan reaffirm their commitment to the ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh region

Moscow, (ST) – Armenia and Azerbaijan reaffirmed their commitment to the ceasefire agreement in the Nagorno Karabakh region, which entered into force yesterday with Russian mediation.

TASS News Agency quoted the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying in a statement, “during a telephone conversation yesterday between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Armenian counterparts Zograb Mnatsakanyan and Azerbaijani Jihon Bayramov, the latter two confirmed their countries’ commitment to the truce in the Nagorno Karabakh region and the cessation of hostilities in the region that had been reached.

Sergey Lavrov announced yesterday that a ceasefire agreement had been reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in the wake of closed talks in Moscow that lasted ten hours for the foreign ministers of the three aforementioned countries on the situation in the region.

Despite the declared commitments, the two sides reported military accidents in the conflict zone, as the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said that Ganja, which is the second largest city in the republic, was subjected to missile attacks from the Bird region in Armenia, noting that five people were killed and 28 others were wounded.

Meanwhile, the press secretary of the Armenian Ministry of Defense, Shushan Stepanyan, denied the reports about the targeting of the city from Armenian territories, saying that “this is misleading information.”

After nearly two weeks of clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to suspend hostilities.

The situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh region witnessed a sudden military escalation on the twenty-seventh of last September, at a time when the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides exchanged accusations about the causes of this escalation.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory that had been part of Azerbaijan before the Soviet Union break-up, but primarily populated by ethnic Armenians, broke out in February 1988 after the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region announced its withdrawal from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1992-1994, tensions boiled over and exploded into large-scale military action for control over the enclave and seven adjacent territories after Azerbaijan lost control of them. Talks on the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement have been ongoing since 1992 under the OSCE Minsk Group, led by its three co-chairs – Russia, France and the United States.

Raghda Sawas