Azerbaijan this Thursday for the first time indicated the number of Russian peacekeepers killed during the Baku offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, with six casualties in two separate incidents.
The Azerbaijani army killed five Russian soldiers on Wednesday by shooting at their vehicle after they were “confused” by Armenian separatists, according to Azerbaijan’s attorney general. According to the same source, a sixth Russian soldier was killed on the same day by “unidentified members of Armenian armed formations” who shot at his vehicle.
The Russian Defense Ministry had earlier announced the deaths of Russian soldiers on Wednesday, without stating their numbers.
Today the Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliev “apologized” to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for these soldiers killed during the Azerbaijani offensive..
President Vladimir #Putin & @presidentaz spoke over the phone.
Ilham #Aliyev offered its apologies and deepest condolences following the tragic death of members of the Russian Peace Corps on September 20 in Karabakh.
https://t.co/XO7Fhszfy1#RussiaAzerbaijan pic.twitter.com/ABBUlfuf3B
– MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) September 21, 2023
At the same time, Russia today indicated that it has detected five violations of the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh, one day after its imposition, following the capitulation of Armenian separatists in the face of an unstoppable offensive by Azerbaijan in just 24 hours.
“Since the agreement to cease hostilities, five ceasefire violations have been recorded in the districts of Chucha [dois] and from Mardakert [três]the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Baku’s latest military success, achieved in just 24 hours, raises fears of a mass departure of Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 residents, but so far Armenia has indicated there are no plans to evacuate the population.
The latest assessment by Armenian separatists shows that the Azerbaijani offensive that began on Tuesday and ended about 24 hours later left at least 200 dead and 400 injured.
The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, with a predominantly Orthodox Christian Armenian population, declared independence from Muslim Azerbaijan in the early 1990s after a war that left about 30,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Following this conflict, a ceasefire was signed in 1994 and mediation was accepted by the Minsk Group (Russia, France and the United States), established within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), but armed skirmishes continued occur frequently. and resulted in serious clashes in 2018.
About two years later, in the fall of 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan, two former Soviet republics, faced off for six weeks for control of the enclave in a new war and with a heavy defeat by Armenian, which lost an important part of its territory . had been in control for thirty years.
After signing an agreement under Russian mediation, Azerbaijan, militarily supported by Turkey, made important territorial gains and Moscow sent a peacekeeping force of 2,000 soldiers to the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Despite the tentative diplomatic clarification, armed incidents continued to occur frequently in the area or along the official border between the two countries, culminating in the serious border incidents of September.
Source: DN
