Urgent calls from world leaders for a halt to the fierce clashes that erupted on Sunday have gone unheeded by the ex-Soviet rivals, who have been locked for decades in a territorial dispute over Karabakh.
The UN Security Council was scheduled to meet Tuesday for emergency talks on the military escalation over the ethnic Armenian exclave, where intense fighting in recent days has caused nearly 100 confirmed deaths.
Ahead of the talks, France said it would push for a meeting of the “Minsk Group” – which is led by Russia, France and the United States and mediates between Armenia and Azerbaijan – to try to resolve the conflict between the two South Caucasus countries.
Both sides said fighting was continuing on Tuesday, despite international pleas for a ceasefire.
Armenia’s defence ministry claimed Tuesday that a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down an Armenian SU-25 warplane over Armenian territory, killing the pilot. Shushan Stepanyan, an Armenian defence ministry spokeswoman, wrote on her Facebook page that the plane had been on a military assignment when it was shot down.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan‘s top press aide Fahrettin Altun called the claim “absolutely untrue”.
Earlier, Armenian defence officials said separatists in Karabakh had repelled Azerbaijani attacks along the frontline and that “the enemy suffered serious losses in manpower”.
The defence ministry in Yerevan said Azerbaijan’s military had suffered major losses since the clashes erupted, with nearly 50 drones and four helicopters downed, and 80 tanks destroyed.
Defence officials in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku in turn dismissed claims by separatist fighters that the Armenian-backed troops had regained control of territory in Karabakh lost in fighting Sunday.
They said “fierce fighting” had persisted in the early hours of Tuesday and that their military had repelled an Armenian counterattack, destroying “an Armenian motorised column and an artillery unit” and, later, an entire motorised infantry regiment.
Azerbaijani forces “continued an offensive on the city of Fizuli, destroying four enemy tanks, an armoured vehicle and killing 10 troops“, officials in Baku said.
“The enemy… asked for help to evacuate corpses and wounded troops” from the battlefield, it said.
Source : France24 News
