Azerbaijan and the Armenian authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh are ready to continue talks started this Thursday on a reintegration of this territory where the Azerbaijani army has just won a lightning victory. In Baku, the presidency, which described as “constructive” the approximately two hours of discussions that the protagonists had in Yevlakh, a town 295 km west of the capital, announced that a new meeting would take place ” as quickly as possible “.

“The parties particularly insisted on the need to discuss all existing problems in a peaceful environment and expressed their readiness to continue the meetings,” the Armenian representatives commented in a statement.

The day before, Hikmet Hajiev, an advisor to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev, assured that Azerbaijan had “the objective of the peaceful reintegration of the Armenians of Karabakh”, who are the majority there, and a “normalization” of relations with Armenia.

Meanwhile, the streets of Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, are “filled with displaced, hungry and frightened people,” Gegham Stepanian, the head of the Nagorno-Karabakh authority for the defense of rights, said on Thursday. . “People are desperately looking for each other and calling … to hear from their loved ones,” he continued on X, formerly Twitter.

During a telephone conversation with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on this subject, asked that “the rights and security” of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh be guaranteed by Baku. The military success of the Azerbaijanis is fueling fears of a massive departure of the 120,000 inhabitants of this enclave. For the time being, Armenia has promised that no mass evacuations are planned.

However, it is prepared to welcome “40,000 families” of refugees, its Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian assured on television on Thursday, even if, he insisted, no “direct threat” weighs on the local population. . In Geneva, Armenia, which described the Azerbaijani military operation as a “crime against humanity”, had earlier denounced to the UN Human Rights Council an ongoing “ethnic cleansing” .

More than 10,000 people, including women, children and the elderly, have already been evacuated from Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist official said Wednesday evening. About half of them were taken care of by Russian peacekeepers, deployed in this region since the end of the last war in the fall of 2020.

When the talks began in Yevlakh, shots, the origin of which is not known, were heard in Stepanakert by an AFP correspondent present on the spot. However, despite “isolated violations”, the ceasefire which came into force on Wednesday is “generally” respected, Nikol Pashinian admitted at the end of the day. Russia said on Thursday it had recorded five ceasefire violations.

According to the latest assessment of the Armenian separatists, the Azerbaijani offensive which ended in 24 hours at midday on Wednesday left at least 200 dead and 400 injured. Azerbaijan has given for the first time the number of Russian peacekeepers killed. According to the Azerbaijani General Prosecutor’s Office, Azerbaijani soldiers killed five Russian soldiers on Thursday by shooting at their car, after “mistaking” them for Armenian separatists. A Russian soldier was also killed the same day by “unidentified members of Armenian armed formations.”