The skirmish prompted international calls to quell the fighting, including from both the Kremlin and U.S. State Department. “We are watching very closely, we are naturally concerned about the situation worsening,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday, Reuters reported.
Here’s what you need to know about the fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the longest-running conflict in the post-Soviet sphere.
The Soviet government first established the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, where at least 95 percent of the population is ethnically Armenian, in Azerbaijan in the 1920s.
But it wasn’t until 1988, as Moscow’s grip began to weaken, that the enclave became a flash point within the Soviet Union. Authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh sought to unite with the then-Soviet republic of Armenia and declared independence from Azerbaijan, another Soviet republic.
In 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, a full-scale war broke out between the two new countries over control of the region. Nagorno-Karabakh is located within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan but is mostly controlled by political factions linked to Armenia.
Between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed in that conflict and hundreds of thousands were displaced before a cease-fire was declared in 1994. Not only did Armenia end up controlling Nagorno-Karabakh but it also occupied 20 percent of the surrounding Azerbaijani territory, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Between 1994 and 2020, periodic skirmishes flared along the border, including the use of attack drones, heavy weaponry and special operations on the front lines. In 2016, particularly fierce clashes between Azerbaijan and Armenian-backed forces in Nagorno-Karabakh raged for four days.
But in 2020, a full-scale war broke out after Azerbaijan launched an offensive across the line of contact held by Armenian forces and local fighters. The campaign, which began on the morning of Sept. 27, sparked a six-week-long war.
“The fighting is the worst it has been since the Karabakh War of 1992 to 1994, encompassing the entire line of contact, with artillery, missile, and drone strikes deep past Armenian lines,” Michael Kofman, director of the Russian Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses in Va., and Leonid Nersisyan, CEO of the Armenian Research & Development Institute, wrote at the time.
The war, they said, featured “modern weaponry … representing a large-scale conventional conflict.”
One of the major features of the war was the military support Turkey, a regional power, gave Azerbaijan. In the months before the conflict broke out, Turkey’s military exports to Azerbaijan rose sixfold, according to exports data analyzed by Reuters. The sales included drones and other military equipment, which experts say helped turn the tide for Azerbaijan.
As part of the Russia-mediated cease-fire, Armenia had to cede swaths of territory it controlled for decades. More than 7,000 combatants were killed, according to the International Crisis Group, and Russian peacekeepers were deployed to patrol the region.
Azerbaijan on Wednesday claimed that its forces repelled an Armenian attack near Nagorno-Karabakh that killed one Azeri soldier. The Defense Ministry in Baku accused Armenia of violating the cease-fire, saying its forces thwarted an attempt by Armenian troops to capture a hill in the Lachin district, an area controlled by Russian peacekeepers, Reuters reported.
The military in Nagorno-Karabakh disputed the account and accused Azerbaijan of killing two soldiers, declaring a “partial mobilization” in response to the clash.
Armenia called on the international community to help stop Azerbaijan’s “aggressive actions” after the flare-up, Agence France-Presse reported.
“Azerbaijan continues its policy of terror against the population of Nagorno-Karabakh,” the Foreign Ministry said.
The cease-fire Russia brokered “brought neither full stability nor security to the region,” Alex Fults and Paul Stronski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in April. “And even prior to the Ukraine war, Moscow’s peacekeepers have struggled to do their jobs.”
Russia, they said, arguably has the most influence of any outside power to push peace forward. But its resources and attention have been sapped by the war in Ukraine.
“After the 2020 war, the front line has become longer and more volatile than before," according to the International Crisis Group.
Sammy Westfall contributed to this report.