Armenia PM says 49 soldiers killed in attacks by Azerbaijan

Forty-nine Armenian soldiers have been killed in nighttime attacks by Azerbaijan, the country's prime minister said Tuesday. Azerbaijan resonded that it had been retaliating following Armenian attacks.

Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan said in Parliament that Azerbaijani forces attacked about half a dozen points, the news agency Interfax reported.

Azerbaijan's foreign ministry said in a statement that Armenian forces had fired on army positions in three districts of the country and that Armenian saboteurs planted mines in the areas. It said Azerbaijani forces suffered unspecified casualties and that “definitive retaliatory measures were taken.” Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.

During a six-week war in 2020 that killed more than 6,600 people, Azerbaijan reclaimed large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas that had been controlled for decades by the Armenia-backed separatists.