Armenian Prime Minister Nicole Pashinyan has signed a “painful” deal with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Russia to end the military conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region after more than a month of bloodshed.
After six weeks of heavy fighting in the declaration on Tuesday morning, in which the Azerbaijani army continued to advance under the roof. Officials in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, said on Monday they had captured dozens more settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh, a day after declaring victory in the battle of Shusha, the enclave’s second strategically second city.
“I made that decision after analyzing the combat situation and discussing it with the best experts in the field,” Pashini said on social media early Tuesday morning.
“It’s not a victory, but it’s not a defeat unless you consider yourself defeated. We never consider ourselves defeated and this will be the new beginning of our era of national unity and rebirth.
As early as Sunday 27 September, Armenia announced that it was declaring martial law, mobilizing its troops and ordering the asylum of civilians. He claimed that his neighbor Azerbaijan had launched a military operation inside the broken territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan said it attacked in response to Armenian shelling.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally known as the territory of Azerbaijan but consists mostly of Armenians who have resisted Azerbaijani rule for more than a century. Independence was declared in 1991 in a region of about 150,000 people and has since ruled itself – with Armenian support – as a recognized republic of Artzak.
The formation of a mountainous, landlocked region, Nagorno-Karabakh, within the borders of Azerbaijan, has already been the subject of controversy. Tensions eased when Armenia and Azerbaijan were both Soviet states, but they re-emerged as the Cold War ended and the Communist Party lost control of the bloc.
The war between the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies ended in a ceasefire in 1994, with Armenia in full control of the Nagorno-Karabakh and other surrounding areas in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is predominantly Muslim and Armenia is predominantly Christian, and some elements on both sides want to portray the conflict religiously.
Michael Safi
As the fighting intensified, thousands fled to Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia, Pashinyan said, adding that the decision was “incredibly painful for me and my people.”
He said the agreement would take effect from 1 a.m. on Tuesday (2100 GMT on Monday), ending six weeks of fierce clashes over the disputed area, in which hundreds have died.
He said the agreement was “the best possible solution to the current situation”.
The news was later confirmed in a televised online meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and then Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The signed tripartite statement will be the decisive issue for the settlement of the conflict.”
Putin said in a statement on Tuesday that he would deploy peacekeepers along the front line in Nagorno-Karabakh following an agreement to end the fighting. He said he hoped the deal would “establish the conditions necessary for a long-running and full-scale settlement of the crisis on Nagorno-Karabakh.”
The leader of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Areik Harutyunyan, said on Facebook that he had agreed to “end the war as soon as possible.”
Earlier, Azerbaijan said its forces had shot down a Russian military helicopter as it flew over Armenia. The incident is about 70 kilometers (45 miles) from Nagorno-Karabakh, but Azerbaijan said it was a contributing factor to the war.
On September 27, fighting broke out over Nagorno-Karabakh. The area has been under the control of Armenian-backed ethnic Armenian forces since 1994.
The fighting has raised fears of a wider regional war, with Turkey backing its ally Azerbaijan, while Russia signing defense agreements with Armenia and its military base there.
Azerbaijan said on Sunday it had captured Shushi, known to people in the army as Shushi, which sits on a mountain overlooking Steppenkart, a city considered besieged by its ethnic Armenian administration.
Shushi’s position, just 10 km (six miles) from Stepnecart, gives everyone who owns it a strategic advantage. The city is also located along the main road connecting Stepanekart with Armenia. Long lines of vehicles jammed the region’s main thoroughfare on Sunday as Nagorno-Karabakh residents fled the fighting in Armenia.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to accept that a series of failures still plague us, and the city of Shushi is completely out of our control,” Vigram Pogosian, a spokesman for the president’s government in Nagorno-Karabakh, said in a statement. On Facebook. “The enemy is on the border of Stepnecart.”
Azerbaijan has said it has regained much of the land in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, which it lost in fighting in the region in 1991-94 that killed an estimated 30,000 people and forced many more to flee their homes. Armenia denies Azerbaijan the extent of its territorial advantage.
The report is contributed by Reuters and the Associated Press.
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