An Azerbaijani soldier was killed and Armenian troops wounded Thursday in a border clash, days before officials from the two belligerent countries are to meet to resolve their three-decade territorial dispute.
Armenia and Azerbaijan traded accusations for starting a gunfire exchange along their restive border.
“Azerbaijani forces are shooting artillery and mortars at Armenian position in the Sotk region” in the east, Armenia’s defense ministry said in a statement, adding that three of its soldiers had been wounded.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said that “the Armenian side has once again violated the ceasefire agreement” with “large-caliber weapons” that wounded one Azerbaijani soldier and the mortar fire was continuing.
Leaders of the two Caucasus neighbors, Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, are due to hold talks in Brussels on Saturday as part of a push to normalize relations.
The European Union-hosted meeting comes after the United States said “tangible progress” had been made at talks between foreign ministers in Washington last week aimed at ending the dispute over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The two leaders had also agreed to meet together with the leaders of France and Germany on the sidelines of a European summit in Moldova on June 1, according to the EU.
Majority-Christian Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose population is mostly Muslim, were both republics of the Soviet Union that gained independence in 1991, when the USSR broke up.
They have gone to war twice over disputed territories, mainly Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian region inside Azerbaijan.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in two wars over the region, one lasting six years and ending in 1994, and the second in 2020, which ended in a Russia-negotiated ceasefire deal.
But clashes have broken out regularly since then.
