YEREVAN, November 17. /TASS/. Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said Azerbaijan aims to deflect attention from the Karabakh conflict by stoking tensions on the border with Armenia.
"We are confident that Azerbaijan is seeking to deflect the attention of the international community from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by stoking tensions on the Armenian-Azeri border," Mirzoyan said at a meeting with the diplomats that are accredited in the country, according to a statement released on Wednesday by the Foreign Ministry’s press service.
Armenia will defend its territorial integrity and the right of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh for self-determination, he said.
"We are strongly confident that this behavior by Azerbaijan is a consequence of the fact that our international partners and the international community, on the whole, didn’t react properly to the fact of the use of force by Azerbaijan during its aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh," he said.
On Tuesday, violent clashes between the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out at their border. Yerevan stated that the Azeri military began advancing into Armenian territory, threatening the highway that connects the Armenian capital with the country’s southern regions and Iran. Baku pinned the blame on Yerevan, saying the Armenian armed forces had staged a provocation by attacking Azeri positions.
In response to the hostilities, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu held phone talks with his counterparts in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The situation later returned to normal after Azerbaijan and Armenia sought to stabilize it, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.