Armenian officials and Azerbaijan on Saturday blamed a peace deal that ended six weeks of heavy fighting on Nagorno-Karabakh, with the Azerbaijani leader threatening to crush Armenian forces with an “iron fist”.
The new conflicts mark the first significant breach of the peace agreement issued by Russia on November 10, which regained control of the vast territory of Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding lands, which had been under Armenian control for more than a quarter of a century.
Separatist officials in Nagorno-Karabakh said the Azerbaijani army launched an offensive late Friday, injuring three local ethnic Armenian soldiers.
Russian peacekeepers sent to the region to monitor the peace deal said on Friday that a ceasefire had been violated in the Qadr region. The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it had not been charged.
Late in the day, the Armenian Defense Ministry blamed the attack on the Azerbaijani army south of Nagorno-Karabakh on Saturday.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Saturday blamed Armenia for the new conflict and threatened to “break its head with an iron fist”.
“Armenia should not try to restart this,” Aliyev said during a meeting with top diplomats from the United States and France, who sought to mediate the decades-long conflict. “It must be very careful and no military action is planned. At this point, we will destroy them completely. It should not be a secret to anyone.”
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said in a statement late on Saturday that its forces had repulsed Armenian “provocations” and restored a ceasefire.
Armenian officials say the fighting broke out near the only settlements in the Kinrut region, the villages of Hintagarh and Ksabart. Both villages are completely surrounded by the Azerbaijani army, which controls the only road leading to them.
Nagorno-Karabakh is within Azerbaijan, but has been under the control of Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994. That war left considerable territory in the hands of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenians.
During a 44-day battle that left more than 44.0 people dead on both sides, beginning in late September, the Azerbaijani army was pushed deeper into Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing Armenia to accept last month’s peace agreement, which reclaimed much of Azerbaijan’s separatist territory. Russia has deployed nearly 2,000 peacekeepers for at least five years to monitor the peace deal and facilitate the return of refugees.
Azerbaijan marked its victory in a military parade on Thursday attended by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and included more than 3,000 troops, dozens of military vehicles and fighter jets.
The peace deal came as a shock to Armenians, sparking protests demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nicole Bashinian, who has refused to step down. He described the peace deal as a bitter but necessary step, which prevented Azerbaijan from capturing all of Nagorno-Karabakh.