BAKU (Reuters)–According to Azerbaijan’s defense ministry–Azeri troops clashed over the weekend with Armenian forces on the border of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh; the ministry said on Monday that both sides had suffered losses.
A statement by the ministry said two Azeri servicemen had been killed and four wounded in an exchange of fire. It put Armenian losses at five dead.
Karabakh Armenia’s in a statement released in the Armenian capital Yerevan denied they had sustained any casualties.
In the worst violence for several months–Azerbaijan said Armenia’s had attacked a border post in the village in the village of Karakhambeili in the Fisuli region of Azerbaijan.
The statement in Yerevan spoke of Karabakh forces repulsing an Azeri attempt to move a border post close to their front lines. It also called for restraint from Baku.
The war over Nagorno-Karabakh was the first ethnic conflict to erupt in the last years of Soviet rule in 1988. More than 35,000 people have died.
Periodic negotiations–mediated by Russia–the United States and France–have failed to turn a precarious truce between the two sides into a lasting solution.
