The United States said Sunday that a new humanitarian cease-fire will take effect Monday in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, despite renewed fighting between the two sides and accusations that each side is responsible for the failure of a previous cease-fire.
The ceasefire is scheduled to take effect at 8 a.m. local time (12 a.m. EDT) on Oct. 26, the U.S. State Department and the Azerbaijani and Armenian governments said in a joint statement.
President Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who have just agreed to abide by the ceasefire, which will go into effect at midnight. Many lives will be saved.”
Earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held separate meetings with the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers in Washington on Friday.
The meetings were also attended by the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, which was formed to mediate the conflict and is led by France, Russia and the United States. The group described the meetings as “intensive discussions” on a ceasefire and the start of negotiations on the core elements of a comprehensive settlement.
The Minsk Group said its co-chairs and foreign ministers agreed to meet again in Geneva on Oct. 29.
But the outbreak of new fighting on Sunday and the collapse of two previous Russian-brokered ceasefires have raised questions about the future of this new effort to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan and is inhabited and controlled by Armenians.
Fighting over the disputed territory, which erupted on September 27, has reached its worst level since the 1990s, when some 30,000 people lost their lives.
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