Azerbaijan and Armenia began accusing each other of violating a cease-fire along their shared border as lingering tensions following their war from two years ago over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh erupt, resulting in casualties.

“On the morning of August 3, members of [an] illegal Armenian armed detachment in the territory of Azerbaijan, where the Russian peacekeeping contingent is temporarily deployed, were subjected to intensive fire from the Azerbaijan Army positions stationed in direction of the Lachin region,” the ministry said in a statement.

Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense accuses Armenian as the being the cause of the resumed eruption in deadly fighting, stating an Azerbaijani solider died, “as a result of the terrorist and sabotage action carried out by illegal Armenian forces this morning.”

Apparently, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense, which identified the seizure of the so-called “Kyrghgiz hill” as a strategic military objective of the allegedly Armenian offensive, launched a counter offensive to neutralize the combat position.

Alongside a counter offensive for the seizure of the so-called “Kyrghgiz hill,” Azerbaijani armed forces took control of “the Girkhgiz peak, as well as Saribaba along the Karabakh ridge of the Lesser Caucasus and a number of other important heights,” as part of its counter offensive.

The Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense issued a demand for the disarmament of “illegal Armenian formations” around the disputed territory after taking control of the strategic heights mentioned earlier.

As the tensions in Karabakh rose, Karabakh, which operates with autonomy, claimed that Azerbaijan’s forces attacked its own forces with drones and mortars.

Simultaneously, Armenia has called on the international community to call for Azerbaijan’s “aggressive actions” to come to an end, accusing Baku of breaking the Russian brokered ceasefire.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense said the situation in and around Nagorno-Karabakh began to deteriorate, and reported on Tuesday that in the past 24 hours Azerbaijani armed forces caused three cases where Azerbaijan breached the terms of its ceasefire agreement in the region under the control of the Russia’s peacekeeping forces.

The European Union, many member states of which are dedicating training, manpower, munitions or weaponry to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, called for an “immediate cessation of hostilities” between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“It is essential to de-escalate, fully respect the ceasefire and return to the negotiating table to seek negotiated solutions,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s spokesman said in a statement.

In September 2020, no less than two years, the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan engaged in deadly fighting over the disputed region for more than 44 days. During the deadly fighting, Azerbaijan claimed to have “liberated” nearly 300 settlements, villages, and cities, while more than 6,500 lives were lost. On November 10th, 2020 Russia brokered an agreement for a ceasefire, a term of which entitled Azerbaijan to maintain territorial control over the disputed region, which lies mostly within the landmass of Azerbaijan.

The resumption of war between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan over control of the disputed region is the result of a protracted historical process. The initial conflict, which erupted in the run-up to the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, led to a war in 1988-1994 war, which claimed more than 30,000 lives at the same time that hundreds of thousands of people became displaced from their homes.

During the previous conflict, military theorist espoused the view of modernized warfare based on drones. Several reports that Turkish and Israeli drones sold to Azerbaijan have given it a decisive military edge over Armenian forces. Hikmet Hajiyev, an Azeri official, told the Financial Times: “What we see is that there was a factor of invincibility that Armenia had tried to propagate over many years… but they relied too much on old military doctrine and thinking: tanks, heavy artillery and fortifications. It simply reminded us of the second world war. Instead, mobile forces, drone technology and a modern approach has been applied by us.”

The FT cited Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, who said: “The Armenians have been caught flat-footed. One side is deploying modern weaponry, and the other is using weaponry from the 1970s and 1980s.” Watling added that given Azeri skill in using drones against Armenia, “it’s obvious that they have received significant levels of advice from Turkey.”

Apart from the military strategy at work within the conflict, reports from Iranian news media indicate that Iran is transferring military equipment to the border with Azerbaijan in connection with the recent resumption of deadly fighting. While Azeri is closer to Turkish than Persian, more than a quarter of Iran’s population are bilingual Azeri speakers of the Persian language. There are reports that Azerbaijan received Iranian war drones.

The fact is significant. Coalescing in terms of Azerbaijan’s weaponry, the use of drones from Turkey, Israel, or Iran appears to draw into sharp relief the confluence of conflicted interests at work in the Armenian-Azeri conflict, as none of these countries’ interest align at all, let alone within the conflict.

In a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace entitled “The Ukraine War Is Reshaping the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict” published in April, 2022, the authors noted that the Russian brokered ceasefire that ended the September 2020 resumption of deadly fighting, brought neither stability nor security to the region “even prior to the Ukraine war.”

“Azerbaijan was forced to distance itself very quickly from a new partnership and “alliance” agreement it signed with Russia just before the war. It also chose not to vote in all three United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions condemning Russian actions in Ukraine, effectively keeping a low foreign policy profile.”

The Ukrainian war appears to be affecting Russia’s ability to manage effectively the peace agreement brokered in November 2022. As the aforementioned report notes, now, as unlike any time before the Ukrainian war, “Russia also seems unable (or unwilling) to enforce the peace, with reports that Moscow no longer has a full contingent of peacekeepers deployed there, and the Minsk Group appears to be a casualty of the war in Ukraine.”

The Minsk Group, the activities of which have become known as the Minsk Process, spearheads the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe’s (OSCE) efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is co-chaired by France, the Russian Federation, and the United States. With the Russian Federation engaged in repelling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s proxy war in Ukraine, the efforts at diplomacy within the OSCE are thereby conditioned.

As the Ukrainian war expands, drawing into its ambit foreign soldiers from the nations of Syria, Belarus or weapons from Poland, Germany, or the United States, the resulting instability in diplomatic, political or economic relations becomes more and more pervasive, causing the collapse of agreements from one end of the earth to the other for countries not even directly involved in the fighting.

The resumption of deadly fighting within the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh is one of many results arising from the shock waves of instability the expansion of the Ukrainian war send throughout the world.