Arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan on Sunday traded accusations of launching a military offensive using artillery fire along their shared border, with Baku reporting two troops killed.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said Armenia’s “offensive” from its northern Tovuz region was met with a “counterstrike” and retreated.
“Two Azerbaijani servicemen were killed and five more wounded,” it added.
Yerevan, on its part, accused Baku of “using artillery in an attack aimed at capturing (Armenian) positions.”
“They were repulsed, suffering losses in manpower. There were no casualties among Armenian servicemen,” Armenia’s defense ministry spokeswoman, Shushan Stepanyan, said in a Facebook post.
The two former Soviet republics have for decades been locked in a simmering conflict over Nagorno Karabakh, a breakaway territory which was at the heart of a bloody war in the 1990s.
The Sunday clashes, however, were far from Karabakh, and directly between the two Caucasus states.
Since the fragile 1994 ceasefire, peace talks between Baku and Yerevan have been mediated by the “Minsk Group” of diplomats from France, Russia, and the United States.
Sunday’s clashes erupted days after Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev raised the specter of a fresh war with Armenia and denounced stalled peace talks over the disputed Nagorno Karabakh region.