The defense ministries of Armenia and Azerbaijan reported a total of seven deaths among members of their armed forces in renewed fighting at one of the sections of the restive border between the two South Caucasus nations.
The Armenian Defense Ministry said on April 11 that four Armenian soldiers were killed and six wounded "as a result of the Azerbaijani provocation from the Armenian side," while the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry reported three Azerbaijani soldiers died.
As of 8:30 p.m. local time, the situation on the front line was relatively stable, the Armenian Defense Ministry said in its statement.
Yerevan and Baku accused each other of provoking the latest skirmish on April 11.
Armenia’s Defense Ministry said in an earlier statement that Azerbaijani soldiers deployed in the fields near the Armenian village of Tegh, inside Armenian sovereign territory that they seized two weeks earlier, opened fire at Armenian soldiers conducting engineering work there.
It said the fighting in the southern Syunik province began at around 4:00 p.m. local time and lasted at least through 5:30 p.m., with Azerbaijan reportedly firing mortar rounds at Armenian positions.
Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry in its previous statement accused Armenian forces of carrying out a “provocation" as a result of which a number of servicemen of the Azerbaijani Army were killed and injured.
"Currently, adequate countermeasures are being taken by the units of our armed forces," Baku's statement said.
It was not possible to immediately verify either side's version of events.
The renewed fighting follows an incident on April 10 in which Armenian security forces said they had detained one Azerbaijani man and were hunting for another, who is also thought to have crossed into Armenia for unclear reasons.
Armenia accuses Azerbaijan of capturing dozens of square kilometers of sovereign Armenian territory in a series of incursions since May 2021. Azerbaijan denies the accusation.
Nearly 300 soldiers were killed on both sides in two-day border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September last year, which proved to be the deadliest Armenian-Azerbaijani fighting since a 2020 war in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh that claimed the lives of close to 7,000 people.
As a result of that war, Baku regained control over large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts that had been under ethnic-Armenian control for three decades.