Azerbaijan has said it has established a checkpoint on the only land route to the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a step that was followed by claims of border shootings by both Azeri and Armenian forces.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but its 120,000 inhabitants are predominantly ethnic Armenians and the region broke away from Baku in a war in the early 1990s.
Azerbaijan said on Sunday that it had established a checkpoint on the road leading to Karabakh, saying the move was essential due to what it cast as Armenia’s use of the road to transport weapons.
Armenia said the checkpoint at the Hakari bridge in the Lachin Corridor was a gross violation of the 2020 ceasefire agreement that ended a 2020 war.
It called on Russia to implement the agreement, which states that the Lachin Corridor, the only road across Azerbaijan that links Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, must be under Russian peacekeepers’ control.
