The village of Khramort came under mortar fire for the fourth consecutive day. According to the authorities in Stepanakert, Azerbaijani troops also fired mortars towards several other Karabakh villages and adjacent farmland on Wednesday.
Suren Baghrian, a 51-year-old Khramort farmer, was wounded in the back when a mortar shell landed near his house in the morning. The explosion was caught on a camera of the Armenian TV station Fifth Channel.
“I was working in my courtyard,” Baghrian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service from a hospital later in the day.
Another Khramort resident, Hasmik Andrian, said most local women and children were evacuated from the village overnight because of intensifying gunfire from nearby Azerbaijani army positions.
“But men remain in the village at the moment,” she said. “We must hold out as much as we can.”
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said, meanwhile, that Armenian forces continued to fire at its troops deployed in the Aghdam district east of Karabakh. It earlier denied targeting civilians.
For their part, the Karabakh authorities insisted that Baku stepped up truce violations as part of its efforts to spread panic among Karabakh Armenians and depopulate the disputed territory.
Karabakh’s Security Council said it is “cooperating” with Russian peacekeeping forces to try to prevent more Azerbaijani “provocations.” “Urgent measures are being taken to force the enemy to honor ceasefire agreements,” it added in a statement.
Armenian media cited a Karabakh official as saying that the peacekeepers rushed to Khramort and set up two monitoring posts there early on Thursday.
In what may have been a related development, gas supplies from Armenia to Karabakh were cut off on Monday night after a pipeline passing through Azerbaijani-controlled territory was knocked out by an apparent explosion.
The gas supplies have still not been restored. Officials in Stepanakert have accused the Azerbaijani side of blocking repairs on the damaged section of the pipeline.
Tensions have also risen along Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan. One Armenian soldier was killed and another wounded there on Monday.
Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian mentioned the escalation on Thursday at the start of a weekly session of his cabinet on Thursday. But he avoided condemning Baku.
“Let us not make evaluations at this point. We will just note this situation and try to focus on ways of solving problems,” Pashinian said, adding that Yerevan is now “working with the Karabakh authorities and international partners” to try to ease the tensions.