Political analysts compare warfare on Azerbaijani-Armenian border with "four-day war"

The Armenian-Azerbaijani armed conflict that repeated four years later has significant differences from the events of 2016, since this time it broke out on the border, which is not contested by both sides, the experts interviewed by the "Caucasian Knot" believe.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the situation on the border of the Tovuz District of Azerbaijan and the Tavush Region of Armenia escalated on July 12. On July 15, both sides reported an escalation decline, but on July 16, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced the resumption of hostilities on the border.

In the opinion of Vadim Mukhanov, a senior researcher at the Centre for Caucasian Studies at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, the current conflict differs from the 2016 one is that the aggravation occurred outside the conflict zone.

"Now, the conflict is not over the territory; clashes are far from Karabakh; now, it's about killing the enemy, the ethnic group living in the neighbourhood. And Karabakh here moves into the background," Mr Mukhanov has noted.

The conflict aggravation in 2016 and now had and has nothing to do with the settlement of the Karabakh problem, said Professor Togrul Ismail, a historian and political scientist at the Turkish University of Political Sciences and International Relations.

The Tovuz District of Azerbaijan has power lines and transport arteries connecting the country with neighbouring states; in this regard, this direction may be of interest to Armenia, Professor Ismail believes.

"In recent years, serious projects have been realized in this region. Given the fact that Azerbaijan has begun taking the first place in natural gas supplies to Turkey and ousting Russia, the picture becomes a little clearer," the expert said.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 19, 2020 at 02:26 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.