Armenia-Azerbaijan fighting escalates on border; 16 killed
YEREVAN, Armenia — Armenia and Azerbaijan forces fought Tuesday with heavy artillery and drones, leaving at least 16 people killed on both sides, including an Azerbaijani general, in the worst outbreak of hostilities in years.
Skirmishes on the volatile border between the two South Caucasus nations began Sunday. Azerbaijan said it has lost 11 servicemen and one civilian in three days of fighting, and Armenia said four of its troops were killed Tuesday.
The two neighbors in the South Caucasus have been locked in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a war there ended in 1994. International efforts to settle the conflict have stalled.
The latest incident began Sunday when Armenian and Azerbaijani troops exchanged fire in the northern section of their border. Officials in both countries blamed each other for starting the fighting and said that sporadic shelling has continued.
Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said two senior officers, Maj. Gen. Polad Hashimov and Col. Ilgar
Mirzayev, were killed in fighting Tuesday along with five other servicemen.
Armenian officials claimed that Azerbaijani drones launched an attack on the Tavush province town of Berd, targeting civilian infrastructure. Defense Ministry spokeswoman Shushan Stepanyan said that one of Azerbaijani drones was downed.
Stepanyan also charged that the Azerbaijani military used civilians as shields, placing artillery close to the village of Dondar Gushchu in the Tovuz district about 6 miles from the border.
“The Azerbaijani side has surrounded its own population with artillery batteries, making them a target, and then complained that the Armenian forces fired in that direction,” she said on Facebook where she posted images of the Azerbaijani artillery around the village.
The Azerbaijani military denied losing a drone and in turn claimed that its forces shot down an Armenian drone and destroyed an Armenian artillery system along with its crew.
From Beijing’s perspective, it is the United States that has plunged relations to what China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, said last week was their lowest point since the countries re-established diplomatic relations in 1979.
“The current China policy of the United States is based on ill-informed strategic miscalculation and is fraught with emotions and whims and McCarthyist bigotry,” Wang said, evoking the Cold War himself to describe the current level of tensions.
“It seems as if every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student is a spy and every cooperation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda,” he added.
Domestic politics in both countries have hardened views and given ammunition to hawks.
The pandemic, too, has inflamed tensions, especially in the United States. Trump refers to the coronavirus with racist tropes, while Beijing accuses his administration of attacking China to detract from its failures to contain
A backlash against Beijing appears to be growing.
What began as a divide in cyberspace to insulate Chinese citizens from views not authorized by the Communist Party has proved to be a prescient indicator of the deeper fissures between China and much of the Western world.
Wang said China never had sought to impose its way on other countries. But it has done exactly that by getting Zoom to censor talks held in the United States and by launching cyberattacks on Uighurs across the globe.
Its controls have been hugely successful at home in stifling dissent and helping to seed domestic internet giants, but they have won China little influence abroad.
India’s move to block 59 Chinese apps threatens to hobble China’s biggest overseas internet success to date, the meme-laden short-video app TikTok.
American tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter said they would stop reviewing data requests from the Hong Kong authorities as they assessed the law’s restrictions.
Wang urged the United States to seek areas where the two countries can work together. Pessimism about the relationship nonetheless is widespread, though most Chinese officials and analysts blame the Trump administration for trying to deflect attention from its failure to control the pandemic.
“It is not difficult to see that under the impact of the coronavirus in this U.S. election year various powers in the U.S. are focused on China,” Zhao Kejin, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University, wrote in a recent paper. “The China-U.S. relationship faces the most serious moment since the establishment of diplomatic relations.”
While he eschewed the idea of a new Cold War, his alternative phrasing was no more reassuring: “The new reality is China-U.S. relations are not entering ‘a new Cold War’ but sliding into a ‘soft war.’”