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Armenian President Nikol Pashnyan has asked his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to provide security assistance to his country in the conflict with its neighbor, Azerbaijan.
Russia said on Saturday that it would provide “necessary” assistance to Armenia in its dispute with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region if the fighting reached Armenian territory.
A statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that “Moscow will provide Yerevan with all necessary assistance if there are direct clashes on the territory of Armenia,” and called on the conflicting parties to cease fire immediately.
Earlier in the day, Armenia asked Russia to initiate “urgent” consultations on how to provide it with security assistance in its conflict with its neighbor, Azerbaijan.
Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that hostilities in the Nagorno Karabakh region have reached the borders of his country.
He added that Azerbaijan is using what it described as “foreign terrorists” in the fighting, a claim that Azerbaijan denies.
Until now, Russia has been reluctant to side with either side and present itself as a mediator.
During their talks in Geneva on Friday, Armenia and Azerbaijan failed to agree on a new ceasefire in Nagorno Karabakh, but agreed on measures to reduce tension between them, including a promise not to attack civilians.
The Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in the Swiss capital in an attempt to find a way out of this crisis that claimed thousands of lives in more than a month.
French, Russian and US mediators meeting under the “Minsk Group” said, in a statement issued late Friday, that they urged the warring parties to implement an earlier ceasefire agreement.
The mediators added that the two parties to the conflict had a “frank and substantive exchange of views, in order to clarify their positions” in the negotiations on the conflictive points regarding the ceasefire agreement reached on October 10 in Moscow.
The two parties are reported to have reached two other agreements to stop the shooting earlier, but without committing to them.
According to the mediators’ statement, the two parties also agreed to “take a series of urgent measures.”
The statement stated that the two sides agreed to “refrain from deliberately targeting civilians or non-military targets”, in accordance with international humanitarian law.
Likewise, the two parties to the conflict have agreed to actively participate in the process of recovering and exchanging the remains of the dead.
It is also imperative that the two neighboring countries submit lists of prisoners of war to the Red Cross within a week “to have access” to them and to facilitate any “future exchanges”.
The two countries also pledged to submit comments and written questions in the framework of the discussions aimed at establishing mechanisms to verify the implementation of the ceasefire, as one of the priorities of the topics of the talks.
“The heads of the (Minsk Group) will continue to work intensively with the parties (in conflict) to reach a peaceful settlement of the conflict,” the statement said.
It should be noted that the Nagorno-Karabakh region is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but is under the control of an ethnic majority of Armenians loyal to the state of Armenia.
The clashes that began in the area in late September escalated into a full-scale conflict, with the bombing of towns and cities and the alleged use of banned cluster munitions.
Thousands of people have died in the conflict, the shelling has killed civilians on both sides, and tens of thousands have fled their homes.
Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988-1994, and a ceasefire was finally declared. But the two countries have not reached a solution to the conflict.
