Russia claims Azerbaijani troops have broken the terms of the peace agreement with Armenia in the Republic of Artsakh.
On Saturday, Moscow asserted that Azerbaijan’s soldiers have entered an area under the responsibility of the Russian peacekeepers that both sides had agreed would enforce a cease-fire agreement after the 44 day way in 2020.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that Azerbaijani troops had established a new post and executed multiple drone strikes in Artsakh, the former Soviet-era region that broke free from Azerbaijani rule in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Russia immediately demanded the Azerbaijani troops pull back to their previous positions. The Russian Ministry of Defense stated “an appeal has been sent to the Azerbaijani side to withdraw its troops.”
Azerbaijan does not agree with the Russians’ characterizations of the sequence of events and claims Russia is not being impartial.
This is the latest flare up in the longstanding dispute. Armenians had managed to liberate most of Artsakh in the Artsakh Liberation war, which ended in 1994 with Armenians controlling Artsakh for nearly over a quarter century.
Opposition forces in Armenia and increasingly, the general public hold Pashinyan’s government responsible for losing two-thirds of the lands previously liberated in Arstakh. Some go far as claiming that Pashinyan is a puppet regime of the Turkish-Azeri tandem, working to bring Armenia into the Turkish orbit. Recent overtures by the Turkish government and Turkey’s explicit support of Pashinyan’s regime does little to dispel that theory.
