Armenia announces truce with Azerbaijan

YEREVAN/BAKU/MOSCOW－Armenia and Azerbaijan on Tuesday reached a Russia-brokered ceasefire, ending hostilities that erupted earlier in the day along their border, the Armenian Defense Ministry said.

New clashes reportedly broke out along the border on Tuesday, with both sides accusing each other of launching provocative attacks.

The clashes that Armenia said left one of its soldiers dead and a dozen others captured sparked fears of another flare-up a year after the Caucasus neighbors fought a war over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia had asked Moscow to help defend it after the worst fighting since the 44-day war last year between ethnic Armenian forces and the Azerbaijani army over the enclave that killed 6,500 people, Reuters reported.

The six-week conflict ended after Russia, which has a military base in Armenia, brokered a peace deal and deployed almost 2,000 peacekeepers to the region. Turkey took the side of Azerbaijan, which regained swathes of land it lost in an earlier conflict.

"Under the mediation of the Russian side, an agreement was reached to cease fire at Armenia's eastern border from 6:30 pm. The situation has relatively stabilized," the Armenian ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said its troops had come under fire from Azerbaijan and that 12 of its soldiers were captured, while two combat positions near the border with Azerbaijan were lost.

Eduard Aghajanian, head of the Armenian parliament's foreign relations committee, said that 15 Armenian soldiers had been killed.

Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said it had responded to large-scale "provocations" after Armenian forces shelled Azerbaijani army positions, and that its own operation had been successful.

Earlier on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan discussed the situation on the border by phone, the Kremlin said.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu also spoke by phone to his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts, the Interfax news agency said.

Restraint urged

Before the cease-fire was announced, the European Union and the United Nations had called on both sides to cease hostilities.

European Council President Charles Michel on Twitter called for a "full cease-fire", while the UN urged Baku and Yerevan to "exercise restraint".

The French Foreign Ministry in a statement expressed its "deep concern" and called on all parties to respect the agreements that were reached in November 2020.

Since last year's war, both Armenia and Azerbaijan have reported occasional exchanges of fire.

On Sunday, they traded accusations of opening fire at their border near Nagorno-Karabakh.

The day before, Nagorno-Karabakh authorities said the only road connecting Armenia to the region－the Lachin Corridor－was briefly closed due to an incident between the two sides.

Agencies - Xinhua