A member of Armenia’s armed forces was killed by fire from Azerbaijani forces on Friday, Yerevan said, during fresh clashes on the border between the two states for the second consecutive day. The escalation of tension threatens to derail talks scheduled to take place on Sunday between the leaders of the two states in the Belgian capital.

The Armenian Defense Ministry reported that one soldier was killed and two others were wounded, noting, however, that “the intensity of the fighting has decreased.”

Yesterday afternoon, the ministry had reported that Azerbaijani forces “opened fire with heavy weapons on Armenian positions near the village of Kut”, in the border region of Gegarkunik.

Earlier, Yerevan announced that the Azerbaijani army had “violated the ceasefire” in Sotk (an Armenian community near the border) “using remote-controlled drones”.

“Two soldiers of the Armenian armed forces were injured” and one of them is in a critical condition, the Ministry of Defense clarified.

For its part, Baku accused Armenian forces of “opening fire with mortars (…) against Azeri positions” on the border.

Last Thursday, an Azerbaijani soldier was killed and four Armenian soldiers were wounded in other clashes on the border of the two former Soviet republics, which have been in conflict for three decades over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

The hostilities took place while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are scheduled to meet in Brussels on Sunday for EU-sponsored talks.

Last Thursday, Mr. Pashinyan accused Baku of trying to “undermine the talks” in Brussels, while he estimated that there are “minimal” chances of signing a peace agreement at this meeting.

The draft agreement “is still at a very early stage and it is too early to talk about a possible signature,” he explained.

The meeting follows four days of intensive talks between the parties in early May in Washington, under the auspices of the US.

The two former Soviet republics of the Caucasus have been involved in two wars, in the 1990s and 2020, over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region inhabited mainly by Armenians that broke away from Azerbaijan more than three decades ago.

After a brief war in the fall of 2020 in which Azerbaijan recaptured territory in the region, Baku and Yerevan signed an agreement brokered by Russia.

Since then, Russian soldiers have guaranteed peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, but Armenia has been complaining for months that the Russian mission is ineffective.