Armenia and Azerbaijan yesterday blamed each other for gunfire along their restive border, days ahead of EU-hosted talks aimed at resolving their three-decade territorial dispute.
The leaders of the two countries are due to hold talks in Brussels tomorrow, as part of a push to normalize relations between the two neighbors in the Caucasus.
The EU-hosted meeting comes after the US said that “tangible progress” had been made at talks between foreign ministers in Washington last week aimed at ending the dispute over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Photo: EPA-EFE / VLADIMIR SMIRNOV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN
However, the two sides yesterday accused each other of shooting along their border.
“Azerbaijani forces are shooting artillery and mortars at Armenian position in the Sotk region” in the east, the Armenian Ministry of Defense said in a statement, adding that three of its soldiers had been wounded.
The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense said that “the Armenian side has once again violated the ceasefire agreement” with “large-caliber weapons” that wounded one Azerbaijani soldier and the mortar fire was continuing.
The incident came just days before European Council President Charles Michel is to host Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani Prime Minister Ilham Aliyev for talks in Brussels.
The two leaders had also agreed to meet together with the leaders of France and Germany on the sidelines of a European summit in Moldova on June 1, the EU said.
Majority-Christian Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose population is mostly Muslim, were republics of the Soviet Union that gained independence in 1991, when the union broke up.
They have gone to war twice over disputed territories, mainly Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian region inside Azerbaijan.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in two wars over the region, one lasting six years and ending in 1994, and the second in 2020, which ended in a Russian-negotiated ceasefire deal.
However, clashes have broken out regularly since then.
The Western mediation efforts to resolve the conflict come as major regional power Russia has struggled to maintain its decisive influence due to the fallout from its war on Ukraine.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
RSS