Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict is a reminder of Europe’s instability

Heavy fighting between the armed forces of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the weekend has highlighted the unresolved disputes and chronic internal instability that still affect key strategic areas of Europe, even as the political and security focus has shifted to external threats.
With the attention of E.U. leaders firmly fixed on Syria’s civil war, the refugee crisis and the menace posed by Islamist terrorism, the sudden eruption on Saturday of violence in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an internationally unrecognised Armenian-dominated enclave inside Azerbaijan, has come as a nasty shock.
Both sides reported intermittent clashes on Sunday after 30 soldiers and some civilians were reportedly killed on Saturday. Both accused the other of using heavy weapons, tanks and artillery, and of responsibility for starting the trouble.
Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia’s president, said the clashes were the ‘largest-scale hostilities’ since a 1994 truce halted a war in which Armenian-backed fighters seized the territory from Azerbaijan.

This post was published at The Guardian