Yerevan/Baku — Fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces raged for a second day as Russia and Turkey took sharply different positions on ending the decades-old conflict in the volatile region.
The defence ministry of the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic said 58 Armenian servicemen and two civilians had died since fighting began on Sunday, while its forces had hit 43 Azeri tanks, four helicopters and 36 drones. A number of positions lost during early clashes were recaptured, said Arayik Harutyunyan, the Nagorno-Karabakh president.
The Azeri defence ministry said its forces destroyed 22 Armenian tanks and other armoured vehicles as well as 15 air-defence systems and 18 drones. It acknowledged troop losses without disclosing a number, as well as six civilian deaths, and said that its forces took some territory north of Nagorno-Karabakh.
While Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson urged both sides on Monday to “immediately cease” violence and resume talks over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fully endorsed his ally Azerbaijan’s military campaign.
“The time has come to end the crisis which started with the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul. International negotiations “failed to solve this problem for 30 years”, he said.
The clashes in the Caucasus region bordering Russia and Turkey add to tensions between them over proxy conflicts in Syria and Libya. Despite decades of US, Russian and French mediation to resolve the conflict, fighting has repeatedly broken out since Armenians took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts from Azerbaijan in a war after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Russia has a mutual-defence pact with Armenia and an army base in the republic, while Azerbaijan hosted large-scale joint military exercises with Turkish forces in August. Turkey has closed its border with Armenia since 1993 in support of Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
While previous flare-ups have lasted only a few days, the scale of the fighting involving tanks, aircraft and artillery appears greater than at any time since Russia brokered a 1994 ceasefire to halt the war that killed about 30,000 and displaced more than a million people.
The crisis put fresh pressure on the Turkish lira and the Russian rouble, amid concerns the two powers could be drawn into the conflict. The lira sank to a record and the rouble was trading near its weakest since the peak of the coronavirus panic six months earlier.
The region contains important energy and transport projects that connect central Asia to Europe bypassing Russia. They include the US-backed Southern Gas Corridor link and a BP-operated oil pipeline that runs less than 50km from the conflict zone and has capacity to export as much as 1.2-million barrels daily from Baku to Turkey’s Ceyhan.
While it hasn’t been targeted in previous conflicts, the pipeline may be vulnerable to any shift in the fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces.
Turkish solidarity with Azerbaijan “is not unexpected due to ethnic bonds”, Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by telephone on Monday. “Turkey could supply military hardware and expertise but it is likely to avoid escalating tensions further.”
Turkey and Russia won’t get involved militarily but have a key role to play in reining in the fighting, said Elena Suponina, an expert on Russo-Turkish ties based in Moscow. “Erdogan and Putin will discuss this and they’ll end up reaching an agreement,” she said.
‘Extremely dangerous’
China, Europe and the US called for a halt to hostilities. The renewed fighting is “an extremely dangerous development”, German government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said on Monday. French President Emmanuel Macron urged Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders to restore a ceasefire in phone calls on Sunday.
There was little sign of the appeals being heeded.
Despite its appeal for a ceasefire, Russia may be standing aside for now as a warning to Armenia “that anti-Russian policies could lead to the total halt of support,” after the 2018 ouster of the country’s pro-Kremlin leader, said Moscow-based analyst Arkady Dubnov.
The two sides in the conflict have never signed a peace accord. Armenia says the right of the Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh to self-determination should be respected, while Azerbaijan says its territorial integrity must be upheld.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have declared martial law and announced a mobilisation of reservists.
This “is a war against our independence, freedom and dignity”, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in a televised address to the nation. “The Armenian people are ready for that war.”
Azerbaijani forces are “fighting on our soil, and have no claim to anyone’s land”, President Ilham Aliyev said in a speech on Sunday broadcast on state TV. “We’ll win because our cause is just.”
Bloomberg
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