These are new incidents that bode well for difficult talks: Armenia and Azerbaijan mutually accused each other of new border bombings on Monday (November 7th), ahead of talks in Washington aimed at ending a conflict that has left hundreds dead. these last months.

The foreign ministers of these two rival countries of the Caucasus must indeed go to the United States for talks Monday under the aegis of the American secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

Just a week ago, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev pledged "not to use force" at a summit in Russia with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But, overnight from Sunday to Monday, "units of the Azerbaijani armed forces opened fire (...) on Armenian positions located in the eastern sector of the border", the Armenian Defense Ministry said in a statement. statement, adding that there were "no casualties".

For its part, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense accused the Armenian forces of having fired "with light weapons of different calibers" on the positions of Baku, without reporting any losses either.

Competing initiatives to end the fighting 

Clashes regularly take place on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In September, fighting between the two countries left 286 dead on both sides and reawakened fears of a large-scale war, like the one that killed more than 6,500 in 2020.

This conflict is linked to territorial disputes, particularly around Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region populated mainly by Armenians which seceded from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s with the help of Yerevan.

A first war had then caused more than 30,000 deaths.

Since the 2020 war, halted by a Moscow-sponsored ceasefire, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been engaged in difficult peace talks, with several parallel initiatives.

The European Union has brought Nikol Pashinian and Ilham Aliyev together in Brussels on several occasions, and the United States had already invited the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers for discussions in September.

Russia, which regards the Caucasus as its backyard, takes a dim view of these efforts, suspecting the West of wanting to compete with it while it is busy with its invasion of Ukraine.

With AFP

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