Azerbaijan Says Armenian Forces Shell Ganja City

The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense announced on Sunday that its second city of Ganja is under heavy shelling by Armenian forces.

Armenia denied that it fired towards Azerbaijan, but the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, said his forces had destroyed a military airbase located in Ganja, according to Reuters.

“Permanent military units located in the large cities of Azerbaijan from now on become the targets of the defense army,” said Karabakh leader Arayik Harutyunyan.

It is worth mentioning that, the two rivals in the Caucasus have been locked in a bitter conflict over the Karabakh region since the collapse of the Soviet Union when the ethnic-Armenian province split from Azerbaijan in 1991.

In a joint call, Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron urged the parties to return to negotiations aimed at settling this long-standing conflict.

“We are ready to deal with the countries that co-chair the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for a ceasefire based on the 1994-1995 agreements,” the Armenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement the day after this invitation.

About 200 people were confirmed killed since Sunday, including more than 30 civilians.