The ministry said, armenian armed units used among others 60 and 82mm mortars and high-caliber automatic guns

BAKU, December 31. /TASS/. The Armenian armed units over the past 24 hours violated the truce regime 58 times at various parts of the front in the Karabakh conflict area, "using among others 60 and 82mm mortars and high-caliber automatic guns," Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Saturday. The ministry said, "positions of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces were under fire from territory of Armenia, and from the opposite positions in Nagorno Karabakh and neighboring districts," which are controlled by the Armenian side. Efforts for peace The situation along the line of engagement in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone deteriorated dramatically overnight to April 2 when fierce clashes began. The parties to the conflict accused each other of violating the truce.

Read also Azerbaijani servicemen down another Armenian drone in Karabakh conflict zone

On April 5, Azerbaijan’s Chief of Staff Nadjmeddin Sadykov and his Armenian counterpart Yury Khachaturov met in Moscow with Russia’s mediation. At the talks the sides came to an agreement on cessation of hostilities at the line of engagement between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces. On the same day, the two countries’ defense ministries announced that the ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh would start at 12am local time. Since then, the parties to the conflict have been accusing each other of violating the ceasefire agreement. The participants of talks on Nagorno-Karabakh in Vienna on May 16 involving the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia and mediated by the foreign ministers from the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries agreed to observe ceasefire in the region in compliance with the 1994-1995 accords. The parties to the conflict also agreed to complete as soon as possible the work on an OSCE tool on investigating incidents on the contact line. In a trilateral statement adopted on June 20 following a summit of Russian Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents in St. Petersburg, the sides confirmed their commitment to the normalization of the situation along the engagement line in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict The highland region of Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh) is a mostly Armenian-populated enclave inside the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan. It was the first zone of inter-ethnic tensions and violence to appear on the map of the former USSR.

Read also No consensus on OSCE new observers in Nagorno-Karabakh, Lavrov says