Armenia and Azerbaijan agree on ceasefire 

Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed to a ceasefire from 12:00 on Saturday following over ten hours of peace talks in Moscow.

Negotiations between Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov were mediated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Lavrov announced the ceasefire would allow for the exchange of prisoners of war and the bodies of the dead and would be followed by substantive peace talks.

He said that specific parameters of the ceasefire still needed to be agreed upon.

He said that the two countries would begin negotiations aiming to achieve a peaceful settlement as soon as possible with the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs — France, Russia, and the US.

The agreement comes after 13 days of intense fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh leaving hundreds dead.

Settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh as well as on the Azerbaijani side have been targetted by missile and artillery fire during the fighting, with the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepanakert, suffering serious damage due to daily bombardment.

[Read on OC Media: Under fire in Stepanakert]

Officials report that at least 50 civilians have been killed, 31 on the Azerbaijani side and 19 on the Armenian side.

Armenia has reported 376 military fatalities while the authorities in Azerbaijan have not released any figures.

For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.