Azerbaijan is accused of not respecting the ceasefire agreement with Armenia
Azerbaijani soldiers at a military training and deployment center amid the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, near the city of Ganja (Reuters Photo)
The Russian Federation, which is mediating the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, accused Azerbaijan on Saturday of violating the 2020 ceasefire agreement by allowing its troops to cross the demarcation line. On Saturday, March 25, 2023, a unit of the Azerbaijani armed forces crossed the contact line in the Shusha district, violating the agreement concluded in 2020, the Russian Ministry of Defense indicated in a statement. He states that the Azeri troops “occupied a height” and “began setting up a post”. Russian peacekeepers “are taking measures aimed at preventing an escalation of the crisis situation and avoiding mutual provocations by the opposing sides.” “The Azerbaijani side was informed about the need to comply with the provisions (of the agreement), to take measures to stop the construction works, and to withdraw the armed forces to the positions they occupied previously,” adds the Russian ministry. Armenia and Azerbaijan, two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, have fought two wars over the past three decades for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. The most recent conflict, in the fall of 2020, left 6,500 dead and ended in a ceasefire brokered by Russia, which deployed a peacekeeping contingent. Armenia has been warning for weeks of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Karabakh due to an Azeri blockade that has caused shortages of medicine and blackouts. Yerevan accuses Russian peacekeepers of not acting to end this blockade.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the longest-running in post-Soviet Eurasia. In 1988, ethnic Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh demanded the transfer of what was then the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) from Soviet Azerbaijan to Armenia. As the Soviet Union collapsed, tensions grew into an outright war. When fighting ceased in 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts were wholly or partially controlled by Armenian forces. More than a million people had been forced from their homes: Azerbaijanis fled to Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the adjacent territories, while Armenians left their homes in Azerbaijan.
From 1994 until 2020, intermittent deadly incidents, including the use of attack drones and heavy weaponry on the front lines and the activities of special operations forces, demonstrated the ever-present risk that war would reignite. In April 2016, four days of intense fighting at the line of separation shook the region, killed hundreds on both sides, and foreshadowed what was to come.
The dam broke in September 2020, and full-fledged war resumed on the 27th of that month. Six weeks of bloody armed conflict finally ended in the early hours of November 10 with a ceasefire brokered by the Russian Federation. Although the deal fell short of a clear and stable peace, it brought an end to the deadliest fighting the region had witnessed in nearly three decades, with over 7,000 military personnel and about 170 civilians killed and many more wounded. Under the agreement, Azerbaijan now again controls in full the seven districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh that Armenian forces had held since the previous war. It also holds a substantial part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. The rest is patrolled by a Russian peacekeeping force but still governed by self-proclaimed local authorities.
By Cora Sulleyman
