Armenia-Azerbaijan border conflict flares up, Russia intervenes

Fighting at the Armenia-Azerbaijan border on Tuesday killed nearly 100 troops across both sides. Control over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has provoked conflict for decades, but recent fighting is the first since a 2020 peace deal between the countries.

|
Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN/AP
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses the National Assembly of Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia, Sept. 13, 2022. The fighting that began Tuesday with the border of Azerbaijan was the most serious since Russia brokered a peace deal between the nations in 2020.

Border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan have killed about 100 troops on both sides in the largest outbreak of fighting between the longtime adversaries in nearly two years, fueling fears of even bigger hostilities.

Here is a look at the decades-long conflict between the two neighbors, and the latest clashes.

What's it all about?

Armenia and Azerbaijan have faced each other in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for more than three decades.

The mountainous region is part of Azerbaijan, but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

The territory in the southern Caucasus covers an area of roughly 4,400 square kilometers (1,700 square miles), about the size of the U.S. state of Delaware.

During the Soviet era, the mostly Armenian-populated region had an autonomous status within Azerbaijan. Long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris, fueled by memories of the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Muslim Ottoman Turks, boiled over as the Soviet Union frayed in its final years.

Fighting broke out in 1988 when the region made a bid to join Armenia, and after the 1991 Soviet collapse hostilities escalated into a full-blown war, killing an estimated 30,000 people and displacing about 1 million.

When the war ended with a cease-fire in 1994, Armenian forces not only held Nagorno-Karabakh itself but also broad areas outside the territory’s borders.

International mediation efforts over the following decades failed to achieve a diplomatic settlement.

The 2020 war

On Sept. 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched an operation called “Iron Fist” to reclaim control over Nagorno-Karabakh.

NATO-member Turkey, which has close ethnic, cultural, and historic bonds with Azerbaijan, offered it strong support.

In six weeks of fighting involving heavy artillery, rockets, and drones that killed more than 6,700 people, Azeri troops drove Armenian forces out of areas they controlled outside the separatist region and also seized broad chunks of Nagorno-Karabakh proper.

A Russia-brokered peace deal on Nov. 10 allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim control of the areas occupied by Armenian forces outside Nagorno-Karabakh for nearly three decades, including the Lachin region, which holds the main road leading from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Armenian forces also agreed to surrender control over significant sections of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia has deployed about 2,000 troops to the region to serve as peacekeepers under the deal.

The agreement triggered years of protests in Armenia, where the opposition denounced it as a betrayal of the country’s interests and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Mr. Pashinyan has weathered the pressure, defending the deal as the only way to prevent Azerbaijan from seizing all of Nagorno-Karabakh.

And the new hostilities?

Sporadic clashes between Azeri and Armenian forces have repeatedly erupted in the area, but the fighting that began Tuesday was the most serious since the 2020 peace deal.

Both sides blamed each other for starting hostilities, with Armenia accusing Azerbaijan of an unprovoked attack and Baku saying it was responding to shelling by Armenian forces.

Armenia said at least 49 of its soldiers were killed while Azerbaijan said it lost 50.

Russia moved quickly to help negotiate an end to hostilities, but a cease-fire it tried to broker has failed to hold and clashes have continued.

Late Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin chaired a call with leaders of countries belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Moscow-dominated grouping of several ex-Soviet nations that includes Armenia. The leaders agreed to send a fact-finding mission including top officials from the grouping to the conflict area.

This story was reported by The Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Armenia-Azerbaijan border conflict flares up, Russia intervenes
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2022/0914/Armenia-Azerbaijan-border-conflict-flares-up-Russia-intervenes
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe