Cease-fire declared in clash over province of Nagorno-Karabakh
MOSCOW— Armenia and Azerbaijan say they have agreed to a cease-fire in Nagorno-Karbakh starting at noon Saturday.
The top diplomats from the two countries said in a statement that the truce is intended to exchange prisoners and recover the dead, adding that specific details will be agreed on later.
The announcement follows 10 hours of talks in Moscow, which were sponsored by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov said the cease-fire should set the stage for talks on ending the conflict.
But the prospects for a broader peace deal appeared dim after Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said in a televised speech that he was happy to have talks but was making no concessions.
“We are winning and will get our territory back and ensure our territorial integrity,” Aliyev said. “Let them abandon our territory in peace.”
The conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, flared late last month and has threatened to spiral into a wider war drawing in Russia, NATO member Turkey and possibly Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “made an appeal to halt combat underway in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh from a humanitarian perspective,” the Kremlin said in a statement.The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh has simmered for decades in a remote mountain region of little geostrategic importance, after a war in the early 1990s ended in a ceasefire but no wider settlement.
That changed when Turkey, which has been flexing its muscles regionally in recent months, openly backed Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally, in an escalation that began Sept. 27.
Armenia said Friday that 376 of its soldiers had died in the fighting to date. Azerbaijan has not been releasing body counts.