YEREVAN.- Azerbaijan is increasing the number of ceasefire violations every year.

Representative of the Chief of Staff of Armenian Armed Forces, Colonel A. Mkrtumyan informed the field assistants of the Personal Representative of OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk - Hristo Hristov and Irji Aberle - in the course of the OSCE monitoring held on Monday.

Since the beginning of the year, the Azerbaijani armed forces violated the truce for about 4,600 times. The Armenian side from time to time was forced to respond to the adversary’s actions.

“The Armenian side opened retaliatory fire for about 450 times to suppress the shelling, 10 times less than the opponent. The figures speak for themselves,” said Mkrtumyan.

Over the past year, the Azerbaijani side used DShK heavy machine guns 250 times, from the beginning of the year - 50 times.

Five Armenian servicemen were killed and seven injured as a result of Azerbaijani side’s violations of ceasefire since the beginning of the year. Only in April four soldiers were injured and three were killed.

According to Armenia’s Defense Ministry, the number of shelling on settlements has sharply increased in March and April.
“I’m not talking about the posts. The shelling of civilians, workers in the fields, villages, even kindergartens,” the Colonel added.

As announced previously, the Azerbaijani side has recently taken a number of egregious acts of provocation - ambulance was fired on April 24 in the direction of Nagorno-Karabakh, on April 25 the village of Dovegh was shelled for about 40 minutes, the target was a kindergarten, on April 26 Azerbaijani saboteurs penetrated into the territory of Armenia and opened fire at a vehicle killing three soldiers.

In 2011, the Azerbaijani side violated the ceasefire more than 12,600 times.