Current Events > Azerbaijan launches military action in Karabakh 'to disarm' Armenians

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https://www.reuters.com/world/azerbaijan-says-six-its-citizens-were-killed-by-land-mines-karabakh-2023-09-19/

Azerbaijan launched military action in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a step that could presage a new war in the volatile area but which Baku said was necessary to restore constitutional order and drive out Armenian military formations. Karabakh is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory but part of it is run by breakaway ethnic Armenian authorities who say the area is their ancestral homeland. It has been at the centre of two wars - the latest in 2020 - since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. It was not clear whether Baku's actions would trigger a full-scale conflict dragging in neighbouring Armenia or be a more limited military operation. But there were already signs of political fallout in Yerevan where Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoke of calls for a coup against him. The fighting could alter the geopolitical balance in the South Caucasus region, which is crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines, and where Russia - distracted by its own war in Ukraine - is seeking to preserve its influence in the face of greater interest from Turkey, which backs Azerbaijan.

Armenia, which says its armed forces are not in Karabakh and that the situation on its own border with Azerbaijan is stable, called on members of the U.N. Security Council to help and for Russian peacekeepers on the ground to intervene. Russia, which brokered a fragile ceasefire after the war in 2020 which saw Azerbaijan recapture swathes of land in and around Karabakh that it had lost in an earlier conflict in the 1990s, called for all sides to stop fighting. Russia is in touch with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and has urged negotiations to resolve the Karabakh conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, adding that Moscow considered ensuring civilian safety the most important issue. Armenia has accused Moscow of being too distracted by its own war in Ukraine to protect its own security and has accused Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh of failing to do their job.

TIL Russia has peacemakers.