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Two explosions were heard around midnight in Stepanakert, capital of the separatist region, as sirens sounded. Residents said the city was attacked by drones.
The two rivals in the Caucasus have entered a bitter conflict over the Karabakh region since the collapse of the Soviet Union when the mainly ethnic Armenian province split from Azerbaijan.
And on Sunday, the fiercest clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces broke out in years over the separatist region, with about 130 people confirmed dead, while fighting continued for the fifth day in a row.
Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday that its forces launched “crushing artillery strikes against the positions of Armenian forces in the occupied territories” overnight. Separatist officials in Karabakh described the nighttime situation along the front line as “tense” and said the two sides exchanged artillery fire.
“The enemy tried to regroup its forces, but the Armenian forces suppressed all these attempts,” they explained.
The two sides claim they inflicted heavy losses on each other and ignored repeated calls by international leaders to stop the fighting.
It is feared that if a direct war breaks out between Muslim Azerbaijan and predominantly Christian Armenia, two regional powers will be drawn into the conflict, Russia and Turkey, mutually supporting each other in the conflict.
Yerevan is part of a Moscow-led military alliance of former Soviet republics and accused Turkey of sending mercenaries from northern Syria to support Azerbaijani forces in the Karabakh conflict.
It also reported earlier this week that a Turkish F-16 jet flying in support of Baku forces had shot down an Armenian Su-25 fighter jet, but Ankara and Baku denied this claim.
Moscow has repeatedly called for an end to the fighting and on Wednesday offered to host negotiations between the two sides.
He also expressed concern about reports of the involvement of militant groups, including elements from Syria and Libya, in the fighting.
The death toll rose to 127, including civilians, while each side announced that it had caused heavy losses to the other side.
Armenia recorded the deaths of 104 soldiers and 23 civilians, while Azerbaijan did not acknowledge any military losses, but an AFP journalist in the southern Pelagan region of the country witnessed the funeral of a soldier killed in the fighting.
On the diplomatic front, both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev rejected the idea of holding talks even with calls to end the fighting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, in a phone call late Wednesday, issued the latest call for a complete end to the fighting in Karabakh, saying they were willing to step up diplomatic efforts to help resolve the conflict.
Karabakh’s declaration of independence from Azerbaijan sparked a war in the early 1990s that claimed the lives of 30,000 people, but no party, not even Armenia, has recognized the region’s independence.
Talks aimed at resolving the conflict, which began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, have stalled significantly since the 1994 ceasefire agreement.
France, Russia, and the United States made mediation efforts within the Minsk Group, but the last and largest of these efforts collapsed in 2010.
