Armenia, Azerbaijan exchange war prisoners

After Azerbaijan made a significant advancement in their long-running battle, the two countries exchanged prisoners of war at their border on Wednesday in an effort to normalise strained relations. In exchange, Azerbaijan released 32 Armenians, the majority of whom had been detained in late 2020. Armenia returned the two Azerbaijani troops whom it had been holding since April 2023. The removal of troops from Armenia and Azerbaijan’s shared border was reportedly under discussion, according to a report earlier on Wednesday by Russia’s TASS news agency, however no decision had been made as of yet. “Thirty-one personnel from Armenia’s armed forces captured in 2020-2023 and one serviceman captured in Nagorno-Karabakh in September have crossed the Azerbaijani-Armenian border and are on Armenian territory,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote on his Facebook account. In the last thirty years, the neighbours in the South Caucasus have engaged in two wars over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region that is a part of Azerbaijan but where ethnic Armenians gained de facto independence in the 1990s. Following a swift onslaught by Azerbaijan in September, the majority of Karabakh’s 120,000 ethnic Armenian residents fled to Armenia. The two parties stated they “reconfirm their intention to normalise relations and to reach a peace treaty on the basis of respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity” when they announced the planned prisoner swap last week. The European Union and the United States, who have been trying for decades to get the two nations to sign a peace treaty to resolve unresolved issues like boundary demarcation, hailed the deal. Following its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union included both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Although Russia views itself as the region’s security guarantee, the conflict in Ukraine has overextended and diverted it throughout the last two years, contributing to a fall in its authority. (With agency inputs)