April 3, 2016 4:40 pm

Azerbaijan and Armenia in worse clashes for decades

Max Seddon and Jack Farchy in Moscow

• The decades-long struggle between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh saw at the weekend some of the worst violence in the smouldering conflict since a 1994 ceasefire, as fierce fighting killed at least 30.

On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, called the skirmishes a “great victory” as the country declared a unilateral ceasefire. But Armenia’s defence ministry said the move was an “informational trap” and claimed the fighting was continuing.

Azerbaijan’s defence ministry said 12 of its soldiers had been killed in the clashes, which began on Friday night and continued through the weekend. Serzh Sargsyan, president of Armenia, said that 18 of his country’s soldiers had been killed and 35 wounded, describing the outbreak of violence as “the largest-scale military activity since the restoration of the ceasefire in 1994”.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous territory populated by ethnic Armenians, broke away from Azerbaijan after a violent war and has run its own affairs with support from Armenia since 1994.

Armenia’s defence ministry signalled it was prepared to ramp up hostilities, saying it would offer the ethnic Armenian leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh “everything up to direct military support” against Azerbaijan.

Despite the official ceasefire, outbreaks of violence across the “line of contact” are a regular occurrence and have escalated in recent years, threatening to destabilise a region that is a big supplier of oil to Europe.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara would back Azerbaijan, with which it has close cultural and linguistic ties, “to the end” against Armenia. “We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties,” the presidency quoted him as telling an Azeri reporter.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan’s defence ministries claimed that Iran had offered them its support.

Russia, which has a military base in Armenia and is Azerbaijan’s main arms supplier, called for “restraint”, according to President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman.

Read More: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d9df0dcc-f9a4-11e5-b3f6-11d5706b613b.html#axzz44mqSgN3v

Categories: Escalation / Destabilization Conflict