Azerbaijan, Armenia announce new ceasefire pact

GORIS, Armenia — Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to a new ceasefire in their conflict over the disputed territory of NagornoKarabakh, the countries said Saturday, days after a truce negotiated a week earlier had unraveled.

The warring neighbors in the southern Caucasus region announced the agreement in terse statements issued by their foreign ministries late Saturday, describing it as a “humanitarian truce” to allow prisoners and the remains of the dead to be exchanged.

But the intense fighting leading up the announcement raised questions of whether this ceasefire would be any more durable than the deal reached after 10 hours of talks in Moscow last weekend, which failed to end the fierce conflict along the front line.

The new truce took effect at midnight, but neither side provided a timeline for how long it would last. France said it mediated the latest ceasefire in the days and hours leading up to Saturday’s announcement, in coordination with Russia and the United States.

Any halt in the conflict would be welcome for people in and around NagornoKarabakh, in the volatile southern Caucasus region between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.

The fighting already has killed more than 600 Armenian soldiers, scores of civilians and an unknown number of Azerbaijanis. It has threatened to spiral into a wider regional conflict, with the potential to further draw in Turkey, Azerbaijan’s main ally; Russia, which has a mutual defense agreement with Armenia; and even the region’s southern neighbor, Iran.

NagornoKarabakh is an ethnically Armenian enclave that is part of Azerbaijan under international law but is closely aligned with Armenia.

A previous war over NagornoKarabakh, in the early 1990s, killed some 20,000 people and displaced about 1 million, most of them Azerbaijanis. Years of tensions since then between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave’s status erupted into open warfare Sept. 27, with Azerbaijan seeking to take control of the territory by force.

On Saturday, Azerbaijan said 14 people were killed in the city of Ganja in an overnight missile attack by Armenia. The capital of NagornoKarabakh, Stepanakert, had also been attacked overnight Friday.

Anton Troianovski is a New York Times writer.