Azerbaijan announced on Saturday that it had handed over to Armenia ten of its soldiers who had been captured during clashes last month between the two Caucasian countries fighting for the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
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The Republic of Azerbaijan handed over to the Armenian side 10 Armenian soldiers
" taken prisoner on November 16, the security services said in a statement.
In return, Armenia provided Azerbaijan with maps showing the location of minefields in territories conquered by Baku in a war between it and Yerevan last year, the same source said. .
The negotiations leading to the agreement were conducted under the mediation of the Russian Defense Ministry, the Azerbaijani security services added.
This exchange reported by Baku is the first concrete sign of detente between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the clashes in November, which left 13 dead.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev agreed last week, during a rare meeting in Russia hosted by Vladimir Putin, to ease their tensions. However, the fighting that erupted last month illustrates the precarious balance between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has been in conflict for three decades over Nagorno-Karabakh.
A war opposed these two countries last year, killing more than 6,500 and ending in a crushing defeat of Armenia, forced to cede to Azerbaijan several regions forming a glacis around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Populated mainly by Armenians, Nagorny-Karabakh, supported by Yerevan, seceded from Azerbaijan with the fall of the USSR, leading to a first war in the 1990s which caused the death of 30,000 people.