TBILISI: Azerbaijan said on Saturday that Armenian forces had fired on its troops overnight, and that Azerbaijan army units took “retaliatory measures,” in an incident denied by Armenia.
The claim and counter-claim came against the background of rising tensions between the two countries, which have fought two wars over the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the past three decades, and a flurry of calls to foreign leaders by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said Armenian units opened small arms fire on Azerbaijani soldiers in Sadarak in the north of Nakhchivan, an exclave of Azerbaijan that borders Armenia, Turkiye and Iran.
The ministry’s statement did not say if there had been any casualties. Armenia’s defense ministry denied that its forces had opened fire on Azerbaijani positions.
The Armenian government and state media said Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held phone conversations on Saturday with the leaders of France, Germany, neighboring Iran and Georgia, and with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Azerbaijan said its foreign minister discussed the situation with a senior US State Department official, Yuri Kim.
The Armenian government said Pashinyan told Blinken and President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran, Armenia’s traditional ally, that tensions were rising on the border and Azerbaijan was concentrating troops around Karabakh. Baku has denied this.
The government said Pashinyan told Blinken and Raisi he was ready to hold an urgent meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to defuse tensions. State news agency Armenpress said Pashinyan had similar conversations with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Hikmet Hajjiyev, foreign policy adviser to Aliyev, told Reuters that Baku had received no such offer.
Azerbaijan meanwhile denounced the holding on Saturday of a presidential election in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is populated by about 120,000 ethnic Armenians.
Nagorno-Karabakh established de facto independence in a war in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Azerbaijan recaptured significant amounts of territory in its most recent war with Armenia, in 2020.
The territory has been largely cut off from the outside world since December, when Azerbaijani civilians blockaded the only road linking it to Armenia. Baku’s troops later installed a checkpoint on the road, in what Yerevan has called a violation of the Russian-brokered cease-fire that ended the 2020 war.
On Saturday, Karabakh’s separatist parliament elected Samvel Shahramanyan, a military officer and former head of the territory’s security service, as its new president, after the previous incumbent resigned earlier this month, saying his presence was an obstacle to talks with Azerbaijan.
In a speech to parliament, Shahramanyan called for direct negotiations with Azerbaijan, and for transport links to Armenia to be restored.
In a statement, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry called the ethnic Armenian leadership of Karabakh a “puppet separatist regime” and said the vote was illegal.
“The Republic of Azerbaijan will resolutely counter threats to its sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders,” the statement said.
“The only way to achieve peace and stability in the region is the unconditional and complete withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and the disbandment of the puppet regime.”
Russia has had peacekeepers in the region since 2020 but Armenia has voiced increasing frustration with what it sees as their ineffectiveness.
On Friday Russia summoned Yerevan’s ambassador in Moscow to protest against what it called a series of “unfriendly actions.”
Relations between Russia and Armenia have sharply deteriorated in recent weeks, as Yerevan has courted Western countries while accusing Russia of “absolute indifference” toward Armenia, with which it is formally allied.