YEREVAN:

Despite calls by Russia and the United States to end the war, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh on Wednesday, killing at least 32 people and wounding several others in the breakaway region controlled by ethnic Armenians, according to Armenia. .

Azerbaijan launches its “anti-terrorism” Operation Some of its soldiers were killed Tuesday in attacks against Nagorno-Karabakh in what Baku described as attacks from the mountainous region. Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Karabakh was being shelled intensively in an attempt to provoke war. He demanded that Russian peacekeepers do their job and warned that unknown forces were talking about a coup in Yerevan.

Ethnic Armenians in Karabakh said Azerbaijan has launched a new war against the 120,000 people who live in the region they consider their homeland. Nearby Azerbaijan is supported by Turkey, with which it has strong linguistic, cultural and economic ties.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to “immediately cease hostilities” and told Pashinyan that Washington supports Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Russia, distraught by the war in Ukraine, called for peace but some Russian officials scolded Armenia for flirting with the West and said it could lead to serious problems.

“This is a big war – Azerbaijan has launched a full-fledged operation,” Ruben Vardanyan, the former head of the ethnic Armenian administration in Karabakh, told Reuters from his capital, known to Armenians as Stepanakert and to Azeris as Khankendi.

He said about 100 people were killed and hundreds were injured. Reuters could not independently verify the figures. The Yerevan government put the death toll at 32.

“Everyone is ignoring it, Russia is silent but the West is also silent,” Vardanyan said.

Another war in the former Soviet Union could disrupt the geopolitical balance in the South Caucasus, a region crisscrossed by energy pipelines where Russia, the United States, Turkey and Iran are jostling for influence.

fighting

Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said earlier on Wednesday that military measures were “successfully continuing”, with weapons and military equipment destroyed.

Armenians in Karabakh, which they call Artsakh, said fighting was continuing with varying intensity. Vardanyan said Azerbaijan continued military strikes throughout the night on Wednesday.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Russian peacekeepers had evacuated more than 2,000 civilians from Karabakh. The mass exodus of approximately 120,000 civilians from the region could lead to a refugee crisis in Armenia.

Aliyev told Blinken that Azerbaijan would stop its campaign only after Armenian fighters surrender, Russian news agencies quoted the Azeri presidential administration as saying.

Azerbaijan stated that its intention was to “disarm and secure the formations of the armed forces of Armenia from our territories, (and) neutralize their military infrastructure”.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “called for an immediate end to the fighting” after the European Union, France and Germany condemned Baku’s military action.

In Yerevan, Pashinyan warned of threats to Armenia’s statehood from “external and internal forces” in a national address on Tuesday.

“I must record that, as expected, calls for a coup are already being heard from various places, even in Armenia.”

History

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1988, clashes broke out between Armenians and Azeris in the region, known as the First Karabakh War, which left approximately 30,000 dead and more than a million displaced. That war ended in 1994 with ethnic Armenians taking control of the mountainous region.

In 2020, after decades of clashes, Azerbaijan – fueled by revenues from its oil and gas exports and supported by Turkey – launched a military campaign that became the Second Karabakh War, rapidly breaking the Armenian defense.

Azerbaijan won a landslide victory in the 44-day war by recapturing parts of Karabakh. Russia then called for a ceasefire and is now urging both sides to return to it.

Protesters unhappy with Moscow’s failure to restrain Azerbaijan chanted anti-Russian slogans outside Russia’s embassy in Armenia on Tuesday evening, Russia’s state TASS news agency reported.

A US military spokesman said US troops will complete a joint military exercise with Armenian forces in Armenia on Wednesday as planned and that it will not be affected by Azerbaijan’s offensive in Karabakh.