Early on June 28, the de facto government of Nagorno-Karabakh reported that four of its servicemen were killed overnight in a major Azerbaijani attack using artillery and drones.
The previous day, Baku claimed an Azerbaijani soldier had been wounded by firing from Karabakhi Armenian positions. Karabakh's armed forces, the Artsakh Defense Army, denied this assertion and called in an attempt to "lay the informational groundwork" for Azerbaijan's own attack.
The fatal incident followed two claims by Karabakh officials of ceasefire violations by Azerbaijan on June 27.
There have been numerous light escalations in the region recently, with both sides trading accusations that are recorded in the Russian peacekeepers' daily bulletins. In several cases, the Armenian side reported civilians getting shot by Azerbaijani combat units while performing agricultural work in bordering villages. Azerbaijan denied targeting farmers.
A day earlier, on June 26, Azerbaijan's defense minister talked tough on the Artsakh Defense Army, which is referred to in Baku as a collection of "illegal armed units".
"We do not rate the capabilities of the illegal armed units in Azerbaijan's Karabakh Economic Zone particularly highly. We know their number, armaments, moral-psychological state, and we know what they can do," Zakir Hasanov told local CBC TV.
"If they resort to some kind of provocations or illegal actions, it will only take one corps of the Azerbaijani army – not even a whole one – to resolve the issue of these illegal armed formations."
Armenia pledged to withdraw all its troops from Karabakh by September 2022. The de facto administration of Nagorno-Karabakh retains its own armed force, the Artsakh Defense Army, which prior to the Armenian defeat in the 2020 war was largely integrated with the army of the Republic of Armenia. Before the war, conscripts from Armenia were sent to serve in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Azerbaijan has periodically justified its now 6.5-month-old blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh by citing the need to thwart supplies of weapons from Armenia to Karabakh’s Defense Army.
Things escalated on the ground just as the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan were convening in Washington for talks on a comprehensive peace agreement aimed at ending the neighboring states' decades-long rivalry.
On June 27, US Secretary Anthony Blinken announced the start of the latest round of negotiations. "We support Armenia and Azerbaijan working together toward a durable and dignified agreement. Dialogue is key to lasting peace," he wrote.
Two separate tracks of talks, one mediated by the U.S. and EU and the other by Russia, have seemed to achieve little progress in recent months.
After an EU-mediated meeting in May, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for the first time explicitly stated Armenia's readiness to recognize Azerbaijan's sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The biggest sticking point in the talks is the fate of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia and Western mediators seek "international guarantees" for Karabakhi Armenians once they are under Azerbaijani rule. Baku has flatly rejected this demand claiming the issue is an internal affair. Many Armenians fear the establishment of Azerbaijani sovereignty will be tantamount to "ethnic cleansing."
Baku has signaled recently that it is in no hurry to reach a permanent settlement with Armenia.
Tigran Grigoryan, an analyst originally from Nagorno-Karabakh, said in a tweet that the timing of the latest incident held a clear message from Azerbaijan: "if you refuse to make concessions during the talks, we will force them on the ground."
"There is another obvious reason why Baku started this escalation amid the talks in DC: they will use it to promote their agenda of disarming NK's self-defense force," he added.
Karabakh and Armenia were sharply at odds on how to respond to the latest incident. Karabakh's de facto parliament in a statement demanded that Yerevan "immediately stop the negotiations" until a full ceasefire can be put in place. Engaging in talks at such a time amounts to "encouragement of Azerbaijan's aggressive actions," it added.
Alen Simonyan, Armenia's parliament speaker, said in response that there was no alternative to the negotiations and advised against making "hasty statements."
Meanwhile, Nagorno-Karabakh has been totally cut off from the outside world for nearly two weeks, since Azerbaijan closed its checkpoint on the Armenian border to all traffic following a shooting incident. The region has effectively been under blockade since December 12, but until June 15 limited supplies could be brought in and emergency patients could be transported out through the Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee of the Red Cross.