International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president Peter Maurer has told CNN that fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone is so intense that even their staff working close to the contact line has to take shelter frequently, CNN reported.

"What we are witnessing reflects other contexts in the world: an internationalization of conflicts which go far beyond only the parties which were traditionally involved," Maurer said in an interview. "This leads to a dangerous assumption in many conflicts. On the surface it appears they have slowed but underneath, the situation remains extremely fragile. It needs obviously very little for the situation to escalate, and these dynamics are difficult to stop."

According to him, the Covid pandemic has exacerbated the situation, with travel restrictions making it harder to conduct important face-to-face spontaneous diplomacy. "(The pandemic) has inhibited person-to-person contact and it has certainly inhibited the informality of diplomacy. ... The virtual diplomacy is still a work in progress—it has not been yet the place or the format in which we can have trustful and confidential negotiations," said Maurer.

All of this makes for a pretty grim picture mid-pandemic. A simmering conflict, like the one in Nagorno-Karabakh, risks becoming a conflagration that defies resolution and, like the virus, can rapidly reverberate around the globe—with deadly consequences.