Armenia directly accused Azerbaijan on the night from Saturday to Sunday of violating the new ceasefire in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. At midnight (local time) the ceasefire started.
According to the spokesman for the Armenian Defense Minister Shushan Stepanyan, there were more attacks just minutes after midnight.
“The enemy fired artillery shells north from 00:04 to 02:45 and fired missiles south from 02:20 to 02:45,” the spokesman said on Twitter.
As far as is known, Azerbaijan has not yet responded to Armenia’s accusation.
It would be the second time in a short time that a truce has been violated in the region. Last week, Armenia and Azerbaijan also agreed on a ceasefire after mediation by Russia, but the two countries quickly accuse each other of violating the agreement. There were also attacks in the following days.
On Saturday evening, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged both countries to adhere to the new ceasefire negotiated on Saturday last week.
Current fighting in region most fierce in years
Since the end of September, Armenia and Azerbaijan have again engaged in heavy fighting in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The area is entirely within the internationally recognized Azerbaijani borders, but has a predominantly ethnically Armenian population, who declared independence as the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (aka the Republic of Artsakh) after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This led to a war, which ended in a ceasefire in 1994. It never came to a permanent peace agreement. Since then there have been regular skirmishes. The current fighting is the fiercest since the war in the early 1990s.
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