YEREVAN. – Azerbaijan has breached the truce more than 16,000 times since the beginning of the year, the Armenian Defense Minister’s Press Secretary Artsrun Hovhannisyan said during a press conference on Monday.  

In his words, Azerbaijan’s growing trend in violating the ceasefire in recent years attests to the fact that, by escalating the tension at the border, this country is attempting to resolve some matters, but it is unable to do that to date.    

“And with respect to the response by the Armenian side, this figure is nine times less, overall,” Hovhannisyan said.  

The Azerbaijani party has used small- and medium-caliber weapons around 3,000 times and large-caliber sniper weapons about 400 times since the beginning of this year.

“Our response was approximately eleven times less. But let us compare the numbers, the information on the casualties; they speak for themselves. It is a marked indicator of the readiness of the army,” the Armenian Defense Minister’s Press Secretary stated.  

To note, Azerbaijan wishes to continually set new “records” in terms of breaching the truce in recent years. It violated the ceasefire approximately 600 times in 2006; around 1,400 times in 2007; 3,500 times in 2008; 4,600 times in 2009; 7,200 times in 2010; and more than 12,600 times in 2011.