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The beginning of this afternoon, Saturday, the ceasefire between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh, which witnessed 13 days of bloody fighting in which hundreds were killed.
The Russian Foreign Ministry had announced that this negotiation had been reached after negotiations in Moscow between the foreign ministers of the two countries, under the auspices of the Kremlin, of course.
Hours after the announcement, an official source said in the city of Khankendi / Stepanakert, the largest city in the region, that missiles fired by the Azerbaijani army fell on the city, Agence France-Presse reported.
AFP also quoted an Azerbaijani official as saying that Armenia is heavily bombing residential sites before the ceasefire.
And Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a statement after the negotiations that a ceasefire would begin “from 12:00 on October 10, 2020 for humanitarian purposes.” Subsequently, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, explained to AFP that the ceasefire would begin at noon on Saturday.
Lavrov indicated that the ceasefire would allow “the exchange of prisoners of war and other people and corpses in accordance with the rules of the Red Cross Committee.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan also agreed to initiate “substantive negotiations” to reach a peaceful solution to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Saturday.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Azerbaijan and Armenia “will initiate, through the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, substantial negotiations with the aim of reaching a peaceful solution” to the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh. Lavrov said that “the specific parameters” of the ceasefire agreement would be agreed later.
Negotiations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers continued in Moscow for more than 10 hours and ended early Friday night.
Following continued calls from the international community for a truce, Baku and Yerevan sent their foreign ministers to the Russian capital to begin negotiations, the first hope of ending the fighting that began on September 27.
Clashes broke out again in Nagorno-Karabakh on September 27 between Armenian separatists and Azerbaijani forces in this region claimed by the two countries.
On Friday morning, the official death toll rose to more than 400, including 22 Armenian civilians and 31 Azeris.
But the death toll may be much higher, as each side announces that it has killed thousands of enemy soldiers and Baku has not announced its military losses. The clashes extended in recent days to the bombing of populated cities, with each side accusing the other of attacking civilians.
