The Armed Forces of Azerbaijan and Armenia have intensified the fighting on the border between the two countries this Sunday, faced since the collapse of the USSR by the mountainous enclave of Upper Karabakh.
The clashes come after harsh accusations of attacks against the civilian population in both countries in which there have been deaths, although there is no official confirmation.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry has launched a "counteroffensive" in response to the attacks that, it claims, Armenia carried out early in the morning against Azeri positions.
Armenia, for its part, accuses Azerbaijan of having started hostilities and declared martial law and military mobilization on its territory.
Moscow, an ally of Armenia, where it has a military base, the EU and NATO have called for an immediate ceasefire that will allow "starting negotiations" to calm the situation.
Meanwhile Turkey has offered its full support to Azerbaijan.
According to Baku, Armenia violated the weak ceasefire in the region by launching "large-scale provocations" early this Sunday with intensive bombardments against Azerbaijani Army positions along the entire front and against settlements on the front lines of the conflict zone.
The Defense Ministry claimed to have caused the rival country severe losses in both military equipment and soldiers.
In addition, Zakir Hasanov, the Azeri Defense Minister, reported that they had taken control of six villages and several strategic points.
The Armenians have denied this and maintain, however, that they managed to "successfully" dodge the attacks, according to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Azeri forces, supported by tanks, missiles and artillery, aviation and drones, have destroyed 12 of Armenia's anti-aircraft missile systems, according to Baku.
Azerbaijan has admitted to the downing of a combat helicopter by Armenia, but claimed that the pilot managed to land and that there were no human losses.
At the same time, he denied that they had lost several tanks, as the Armenians had reported hours earlier.
In a message on his Twitter account, Pashinyan denounced Azerbaijan's offensive "with air strikes and missiles against Artsakh [Armenian name of Upper Karabakh], and assured that the Army would do everything to protect its" homeland from the Azeri invasion. "Prepare to defend our sacred homeland," Pashinián told the population in a statement quoted by the British channel BBC. Faced with this increase in hostilities, NATO has called on both countries for a peaceful solution. "The parties must cease immediately hostilities that have already caused civilian casualties. There is no military solution to this conflict. The parties must resume negotiations to achieve a peaceful resolution, the Atlantic Alliance has indicated in an official statement attributed to the special representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, James Appathurai.
Turkey, a key player in this conflict, has responded by offering its "full support" to Azerbaijan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assured that "solidarity" with Baku "will continue and increase."
Turkey maintains as a state policy its unwavering support for Azerbaijan under the motto that it is “two states, one nation”.
Faced with this situation, the Armenian president Pashinyan asked the international community to ensure that Turkey does not get involved in his country's conflict with Azerbaijan over the Upper Karabakh region, Reuters reports.
Pashinyan warned that Turkey's behavior could have destructive consequences for the South Caucasus and neighboring regions.
An escalation of the conflict worries the countries of the region because they fear that a new war could also drag Russia, an ally of Armenia, and Turkey, which on Sunday reiterated its support for Baku, defending Azerbaijan.
Moscow immediately advocated for calm and the restoration of the ceasefire, while Charles Michel, president of the European Council, called on both countries to stop hostilities and return to negotiations "without preconditions."
The mountainous enclave of Upper Karabakh (or Nagorno Karabakh), controlled by Armenia on Azerbaijani soil, is the scene of one of the territorial conflicts that became entrenched after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It seems that since the brief four-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2016, both states have been preparing for new armed conflicts and, in fact, the fighting has been repeated more and more frequently and with increasing frequency. intensity.
In addition, not only circumscribed to the enclave of Upper Karabakh, but along the border between the two countries, as happened last July in the Tavush region.
That was a shock that left a fortnight dead and that Baku attributes to an Armenian attack in a strategic area of Azerbaijan, since several key pipelines for the supply of oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe run alongside it.
In 1994, Baku and Yerevan reached a ceasefire and led a resolution to the conflict within the framework of dialogue of the so-called Minsk group (co-led by Russia, the United States and France and under the auspices of the OSCE), but since then they have been continued to produce incidents.
Increase in military spending
Defense spending in both countries has skyrocketed in the last decade and takes a significant part of their budget: around 4% of GDP, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Studies Institute (SIPRI). Thanks to the oil boom that Azerbaijan has experienced since the 2000s, Baku has modernized its Armed Forces and quadrupled its military spending to more than 1,500 million dollars per year, incorporating cutting-edge weapons of Russian, Israeli and Turkish origin. Armenia has tried to lag behind but, due to its smaller economy, its military budget is one-third that of its neighbor and rival. However, the Azerbaijani government complains that, in the last year, Yerevan has received 500 tons of Russian military equipment and, according to some reports, it is high-tech weaponry. “We have detected shipments by air and by land through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran. We have asked our Russian colleagues what they have sent and why, but we have not received any response, ”lamented the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Azerbaijani Presidency, Hikmet Hajiyev, in a recent meeting with journalists in Istanbul attended by El Country. “We know that it is not material for civilian use, but military, but we do not know specifically what weapons it is. Furthermore, in recent months we have detected an unusual concentration of Armenian troops on the border. " But Azerbaijan has also strengthened its positions with the arrival of the Turkish military and, according to various media, Syrian rebels like those that Turkey has also used in the Libyan war.