Nagorno-Karabakh has remained an unstable area since the 2020 war, and recent exchanges of fire are a reminder of this. An Azerbaijani soldier and an Armenian fighter were killed on Wednesday (August 3rd) near this Armenian-backed separatist enclave, authorities on both sides said.
Wednesday morning, “intense shooting” targeted Azerbaijani army positions in the Lachin district, a buffer zone between the Armenian border and Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry reported. An Azerbaijani conscript was killed in these shots from “illegal Armenian military formations”he specified.
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The Armenian separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh reported, for their part, the death of one of their soldiers in an attack carried out by an Azerbaijani drone in the afternoon. Eight Armenian separatist fighters were also injured, the separatist army said.
After a first war that killed more than 30,000 people in the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed again in the fall of 2020 for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region which, supported by Yerevan had seceded from Azerbaijan.
More than 6,500 people were killed in this new war lost by Armenia. As part of a ceasefire agreement brokered by Moscow, which deployed peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan ceded significant territory.
Despite a timid diplomatic relaxation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, armed incidents remain frequent in the area or along the official border between the two countries.