Azerbaijani and Armenian officials have exchanged fresh accusations of violations of a 1994 cease-fire.
Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said on January 26 that Armenian troops had violated the cease-fire 124 times in the last 24 hours.
A statement from the Azerbaijani ministry that 17 Armenian troops and three Azerbaijani soldiers have been killed in clashes since January 1.
Meanwhile, the Armenian defense minister’s spokesman, Artsrun Hovannisian, wrote on Facebook on January 26 that "Armenian forces fully control the situation" along both the border with Azerbaijan and the "contact line" between Azerbaijani-held territory and Nagorno-Karabakh, which is held by ethnic Armenians.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s de-facto defense ministry claimed on January 24 that Azerbaijan had violated the cease-fire 1,800 times last week and that 14 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed.
Baku and Yerevan have been locked in a conflict over Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh for years. Armenian-backed separatists seized the mainly Armenian-populated region from Azerbaijan during a war in the early 1990s that killed some 30,000 people. Diplomatic efforts to settle the conflict have brought little progress.
