Armenia’s Ministry of Defense said the incident happened at the southeastern section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border at around 9:50 am on November 18.
It said the soldier, whose full name was not immediately disclosed, received a gunshot wound after a shot fired by the Azerbaijani military against an Armenian combat outpost near the village of Paruyr Sevak, which is at the border with Azerbaijan’s western exclave of Nakhichevan.
The ministry said the condition of the wounded soldier was assessed as moderate and there was no immediate danger to his life.
“An investigation is underway to clarify all the circumstances of the incident,” it added.
Azerbaijan, meanwhile, categorically denied the report disseminated by the Armenian Defense Ministry, calling it a “lie.”
“We categorically deny the provocative information of the opposite side,” Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said.
The border incident reported by Armenia is the first in more than a month. Reported incidents and mutual accusations between Armenia and Azerbaijan virtually discontinued several weeks after Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19 that led to Baku’s establishing full control over the region.
More than 100,000 Armenians fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh and moved to Armenia after Baku’s military operation. Only a few dozen ethnic Armenians are currently thought to remain in the region.
The reported incident also comes as Armenia is hosting an autumn session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly.
Addressing the opening meeting of the three-day session in Yerevan on Saturday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian regretted that “Yerevan and Baku still speak different diplomatic languages” and that “we often do not understand each other.”
He also urged the Azerbaijani leadership to reaffirm their commitment to the principles for reaching a peace agreement that he said has been agreed upon by the parties during their recent negotiations mediated by the West.
Azerbaijan has lately refused to attend several meetings with Armenia arranged by the European Union and the United States. Most recently Baku said it would not send its foreign minister to Washington to meet with his Armenian counterpart there on November 20 after allegedly “biased” remarks by a senior U.S. official.
Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev were scheduled to meet on the fringes of the EU’s October 5 summit in Granada, Spain. Pashinian had hoped that they would sign there a document laying out the main parameters of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. However, Aliyev withdrew from the talks at the last minute.
The Azerbaijani leader also appears to have canceled another meeting which European Council President Charles Michel planned to host in Brussels later in October.
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