An Azerbaijani soldier and an Armenian fighter were killed on Wednesday (August 3rd) near Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-backed separatist enclave that has remained unstable since a war in late 2020, authorities on both sides said.
On Wednesday morning, "
intense fire
" targeted Azerbaijani army positions in the Lachin district, a buffer zone between the Armenian border and Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said in a statement.
An Azerbaijani conscript was killed in the shooting from "
illegal Armenian military formations
", he said.
The Armenian separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh reported, for their part, the death of one of their soldiers in an attack carried out by an Azerbaijani drone in the afternoon.
Eight Armenian separatist fighters were also injured, the separatist army said in a statement.
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After a first war that killed more than 30,000 people in the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed again in the fall of 2020 for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region which, supported by Yerevan , had seceded from Azerbaijan.
More than 6500 people were killed in this new war lost by Armenia.
As part of a ceasefire agreement brokered by Moscow, which deployed peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan ceded significant territory.
Despite a timid diplomatic relaxation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, armed incidents remain frequent in the area or along the official border between the two countries.
