YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Azerbaijan and Armenian forces reached a cease-fire agreement Wednesday to end two days of fighting in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region that has been a flashpoint for decades, officials on both sides said.
An hour after the truce was announced, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that the intensity of the hostilities in the region “has decreased drastically.” Azerbaijani authorities said they had halted the military operation launched a day earlier once separatist officials said they were laying down arms.
The hostilities also exacerbated an already grim humanitarian situation for residents who have suffered food and medicine shortages for months as Azerbaijan instituted a blockade of the road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
Having lost the war in 2020 and most recently control of the only road linking the country to Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia had very little leverage in the breakaway region, Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe think tank, said in an interview Tuesday.
Azerbaijan’s forces claimed to be only targeting military sites but ethnic Armenian officials in Nagorno-Karabakh said that Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway region, and other villages were “under intense shelling” Tuesday.
Associated Press writers Jim Heintz and Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia; Aida Sultanova in London; and Siranush Sargsyan in Stepanakert contributed to this report.
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