Interviewed by “168 Zham,” Andrey Areshev, a Russian political analyst, blames Azerbaijan for the latest escalation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict which he links with the planned meeting of the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers. “It’s obvious that there are influential forces in Baku that are not interested even in the semblance of a Karabakh negotiation process and are trying to demonstrate their power and intransigence towards the Armenian sides in such a fashion,” he says. “But I think that this is a wrong path that can only generate the kind of retaliatory steps which, as far as I understand, the Karabakh side took [on Tuesday.]”
Stepan Safarian, an Armenian pundit, tells “Haykakan Zhamanak” that Azerbaijan has already deployed and used artillery inside its villages close to Armenia or Karabakh before. He says Baku will exploit this week’s deaths of two Azerbaijani civilians to provoke more flare-ups of fighting in the conflict zone.
“Hatred towards a nation and a desire to take revenge on a whole ethnic group must not blind our minds,” “Aravot” writes in an editorial on this week’s bloodshed in Karabakh. “First of all, because war requires composure. Secondly, we are fighting for not only our lands or the security of our people but also for the values with which we, Armenians, want to present ourselves to the world.” Therefore, it says, Tuesday’s violent death of an Azerbaijani toddler near the Karabakh “line of contact” was as tragic and unfortunate as any Armenian civilian casualty. “The enemy is exploiting it for political aims,” it says.
(Tigran Avetisian)