Armenia and Azerbaijan have blamed each other for gunfire along their restive border, days in advance of EU-hosted talks aimed at resolving their 30-year-old territorial dispute.
The fighting came on Thursday as the two countries are in negotiations on a peace agreement to end a decades-long standoff over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated mainly by Armenians.
The incident comes just days before European Council President Charles Michel is to host Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev for talks in Brussels on Saturday.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in two wars over the region, one lasting six years and ending in 1994, and the second in 2020, which ended in a Russia-negotiated ceasefire deal. But clashes have broken out regularly since then.
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