The Azerbaijani military made the claims on Sunday and Monday. It said Armenian army units targeted its troops at various sections of the long border.
The Defense Ministry in Yerevan dismissed the claims, again challenging Baku to present evidence of the alleged truce violations. It said Azerbaijani troops themselves fired at the village of Khnatsakh and damaged one of its houses shortly after midnight.
The ministry released photographs purportedly showing a bullet hole on a window glass of the house. Local residents confirmed the cross-border gunfire. According to them, the damaged house belongs to the head of the village administration, Seyran Mirzoyan. The latter could not immediately be reached for comment.
Kamela Ohanian, a woman from Khnatsakh, said she was woken up by the sound of gunfire on Sunday night.
“There was shooting again at night,” Ohanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service by phone. “It happened several times and for a long time.”
Residents of Khnatsakh as well as the nearby village of Khoznavar reported gunfire from nearby Azerbaijani army positions for several consecutive nights last week. They said the gunshots were mainly fired into the air from around 10 p.m. until the early hours of the next morning. Defense Minister Suren Papikian downplayed the significance of the gunshots, saying that they are “not directed towards Armenia.”
Azerbaijan began accusing Armenian of violating the ceasefire regime on a daily basis just a few days after the two sides finalized on March 13 a bilateral peace treaty. Armenian opposition figures and pundits suggested that the accusations, denied by Yerevan, are aimed at preparing the ground for a military attack on Armenia or forcing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to make more concessions.
Yerevan already made a number of concessions to remove the remaining disagreements on the text of the draft treaty. It has repeatedly appealed to Baku to promptly sign the treaty.
Baku has set a number of conditions for that, notably a change of Armenia’s constitution which it says contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry reiterated on Monday that the constitution is “the main obstacle” to peace.