Azerbaijan’s Border Guard Service accused Armenian troops of opening fire at its checkpoint controversially set up last month in the Lachin corridor connecting Armenia to Karabakh. It said that one of the servicemen manning the checkpoint was wounded.
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) said, meanwhile, that its border guards stopped a group of Azerbaijani servicemen from advancing into Armenian territory from the checkpoint and placing an Azerbaijani flag there.
Later in the morning, fighting also erupted at a nearby section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Armenian soldiers and border guards deployed there came under Azerbaijani mortar and small arms fire, the NSS said, adding that one of them was wounded early in the afternoon. Baku accused the Armenian side of provoking that skirmish.
In a statement, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry condemned the Armenian “provocation” near the Lachin checkpoint, saying that Armenia is trying to thwart its “successful functioning.” It also claimed that Yerevan is “not interested” in the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations.
Shortly after that incident, authorities in Karabakh reported that the Azerbaijan completely halted the movement through the Lachin corridor of humanitarian convoys organized by Russian peacekeepers and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). They said Red Cross vehicles carrying 25 Karabakh patients and their family members were turned away from the checkpoint and had to return to Stepanakert.
Baku set up the checkpoint last month in what Yerevan and Stepanakert regard as a gross violation of a Russian-brokered agreement that stopped the 2020 war in Karabakh.
The latest skirmishes highlight tensions along the border between the two South Caucasus countries and the Karabakh “line of contact” which have been rising despite major progress made during recent Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.
On Wednesday, two Indian workers building a new metallurgical plant in the Armenian border village of Yeraskh were seriously wounded in what the Armenian military described as cross-border fire from nearby Azerbaijani army positions.
“We are deeply concerned that two civilian employees of a U.S.-affiliated company in Armenia sustained injuries from gunfire from the direction of Azerbaijan,” the U.S. State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, tweeted afterwards.
“We reiterate our call for restraint along the borders as the parties work toward a durable and balanced peace,” Miller wrote.
Several dozen foreign diplomats, including the Yerevan-based ambassadors of France, Germany and China, visited Yeraskh on Thursday.