7 soldiers killed in Azerbaijan-Armenia border clashes

Seven soldiers have been killed in border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Ministry of Defence of Armenia reported that four of their soldiers lost their lives and six others were injured in border clashes with Azerbaijan.

The Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan revealed that three of their soldiers were killed in the confrontation. The ministry claimed that Armenian forces opened fire against Azeri positions near the settlement of Dyg in the border area.

According to the Ministry of Defence of Armenia, at 16.00 local time on Tuesday, Azeri soldiers opened fire against Armenian soldiers who were conducting engineering work.

The two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus engaged in a short-lived battle for control of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. Azerbaijan, which received direct military support from the Turkish state, occupied swathes of Armenian territory following the battle. Although a ceasefire was brokered by Russia, occasional exchanges of fire have been reported along the border line.

The Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, and the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, met multiple times for a peace agreement under the mediation of the EU and the USA. The talks, however, have yielded no concrete results so far.

The mountainous region populated mostly by Armenians seceded from Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armenia won the first war between the countries in the early 1990s that killed 30 thousand people.

The war in the autumn of 2020 led to 6500 deaths and Azerbaijani occupation of many regions in Nagorno-Karabakh.