Ceasefire Reached in Nagorno-Karabakh Following Fatal Military Offensive – Great

A ceasefire agreement has been reached a day after Azerbaijan launched a new military offensive against the local Armenian government in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The agreement was due to take effect at 1pm local time and includes provisions for the local Armenian government to disband its local military, in what appears to be a capitulation to Azerbaijan.

The numbers of dead and wounded in Nagorno-Karabakh jumped overnight. A former head of the local government said close to 100 people had been killed and hundreds more injured after Azerbaijan launched what it described as an “anti-terrorist operation” in the disputed South Caucasus region on Tuesday.

Officials in the regional capital, Stepanakert, and in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, confirmed that representatives would meet in Yevlakh, in Azerbaijan, on Thursday for negotiations. Azerbaijan, which has demanded the dissolution of the local government in Nagorno-Karabakh, has said the talks will touch on plans for the reintegration of the region into Azerbaijan.

The local government in Stepanakert did not mention any provisions to reintegrate the territory. In a statement, it cited an agreement to “pull out the remaining detachments and troops of the Armenian armed forces from the zone of deployment of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, to disband and fully disarm armed units of the Nagorno-Karabakh defence army, and pull out heavy hardware and weapons from the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh for the sake of their soonest possible disposal.”

Both sides said the agreement had been mediated by a local Russian peacekeeping force that has been deployed in the region since war broke out in 2020.

Map of Nagorno-Karabakh

Local officials earlier said 27 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan launched its new offensive.

Video posted to social media showed large explosions overnight in Stepanakert and other large population centres.

Ruben Vardanyan, the ex-head of the local administration, cited higher casualties in what he told Reuters was the beginning of a “big war”.

“Azerbaijan has started a full operation,” he said. “They are basically saying to us that we need to leave, not stay here, or accept that this is a part of Azerbaijan. This is basically a typical ethnical cleansing operation and a war with a lot of civilians now being killed.”

Azerbaijan’s presidential administration said the attacks would continue until “illegal Armenian military formations” surrendered and the separatist government of Nagorno-Karabakh was dismantled.

Separatist Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh said Azerbaijan had broken through their lines and seized a number of heights and strategic road junctions, while the world had stood by, doing nothing. The self-styled “Republic of Artsakh” said that in such circumstances, it had no choice but to cease hostilities.

Azerbaijani officials had demanded that the local government dissolve as a precondition to negotiations.

Although Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory, part of it is run by separatist Armenian authorities who say the area is their ancestral homeland. The region has been at the centre of two wars since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the latest in 2020.

Azerbaijan’s defence ministry announced the start of the operation on Tuesday, saying frontline positions and military assets of Armenia’s armed forces were being “incapacitated using high-precision weapons” and that only legitimate military targets were being attacked.

Armenia’s foreign ministry denied that its weapons or troops were in Nagorno-Karabakh and called reports of sabotage and landmines in the region “a lie”.

Nagorno-Karabakh and sizeable surrounding territories had been under ethnic Armenian control since the end of a separatist war in 1994, but Azerbaijan regained the territories and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh during the 2020 fighting. That ended with an armistice placing Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The hostilities come amid high tensions between Armenia and its longtime ally Russia. Armenia has complained repeatedly that the 2,000-member Russian peacekeeping force was unable or unwilling to keep the road to Armenia open, even though that duty was stipulated in the agreement that ended the 2020 war.

Armenia angered Russia, which has a military base in the country, by holding military exercises with the US this month and by moving toward ratifying the Rome convention that created the international criminal court, which has indicted Vladimir Putin.

Thousands of protesters gathered on Tuesday in central Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, blocking streets and demanding that authorities defend Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Some clashed with police, who reportedly used stun grenades. A total of 34 people – 16 police and 18 civilians – were injured in the clashes, Armenia’s health ministry said.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report