Armenians say that Turkey stands behind the Azerbaijani attack against Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian troops stationed round Talish village assure that the Azerbaijani troops they were fighting against included Turkish soldiers and ISIL recruits, who came from Turkey to fight against Christian Armenians.   

“The majority comes from Turkey, but there are also contractors among them. They would never be able to start the offensive without the help and support of Ankara,” Le Figaro cites one of the Armenian officers. According to Yerevan, the carnage of the three old men in Talish proves that the ISIL acts for Baku in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. 

The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the most explosive and frozen conflicts inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union, correspondent Nicolas Vigne writes. According to the European diplomat working in the region, this conflict cannot even be called “frozen”: “Here we deal with a volcano, which periodically starts erupting, but it’s impossible to predict the time and force of that eruption.”

Azerbaijan states about its readiness to reoccupy the region by force if the Minsk Group finds no political solution. Armenia, where the Christian church has very strong positions, sees the hand of Ankara in the resumption of military actions. And although Turkey is not officially a party to the conflict, on April 4 President Erdoğan  said: “We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties,” the newspaper cites.

It will be very difficult for Moscow, which is acting as a truce initiator, to make peace between the two opposing sides. During the Syrian campaign, the Turkish army downed two Russian jets; Russia and Turkey are at loggerheads now, the correspondent writes. This makes one fear of resumption of war in the region though mediators. “Would many people in Nagorno-Karabakh want to have such a scenario? They actually reproach Kremlin, which has military bases in Armenia, for not showing enough support to Yerevan in resisting Baku,” Nicolas Vigne notes.   

Russia sells weapons both to Armenia and Azerbaijan, but plying the role of a banker and military sponsor, it is ready to destabilize one of its allies against the other, the article says.