YEREVAN, April 5 /TASS/. The Azerbaijani army has resumed, although with less intensity, the shelling of the Karabakh army’s positions on the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh, Colonel Senor Asratyan, the press secretary of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army, told TASS by telephone on Tuesday.
He said the fire was underway in the northeastern direction of the contact line. Colonel Asratyan noted that the Karabakh army was refraining from retaliatory measures in a bid to stay committed to the ceasefire agreements reached earlier on Tuesday.
"A truce has not been established but an agreement to observe the ceasefire has been reached," Armenian First Deputy Defense Minister David Tonoyan told the Armenian parliament on Tuesday.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a de facto independent Armenian populated region, is internationally recognized to be part of Azerbaijan.
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On 10 December 1991, in a referendum boycotted by local Azerbaijanis, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh approved the creation of an independent state. The struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh escalated after both Armenia and Azerbaijan attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
By the end of 1993, the conflict had caused thousands of casualties and created hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides.
The leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and the unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh signed a ceasefire treaty in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek in May 1994 on the initiative of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, the Kyrgyz parliament and the parliament and the foreign ministry of Russia.
The warring parties stopped all military hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh on May 12, 1994.
Fierce armed clashes erupted on the contact line separating the sides in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the night to April 2. The sides have accused each other of violating the truce.
Earlier, the defense ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan announced the cessation of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh as of 11:00 Moscow time on Tuesday.