Azerbaijan says Russian peacekeepers have completed withdrawal

Russian peacekeepers on Wednesday completed their withdrawal from Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Baku recaptured last year from Armenian separatists, officials in Baku said.

Azerbaijan and Armenia had fought two wars - in 2020 and in the 1990s - for control of the then-breakaway enclave.

"The process of the full withdrawal of the manpower, weapons, and equipment of Russia's peacekeeping contingent (in Karabakh) from Azerbaijan was completed on June 12," the defence ministry in Baku said in a statement.

The withdrawal, which began in April, has been agreed between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev.

Last September, Baku took over the territory in a lightning one-day offensive that triggered a refugee crisis. Almost the entire local population of around 100,000 ethnic Armenians left for Armenia, fearing reprisals and repression.

The territory is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan despite historically being home to a majority Armenian population. It was controlled by pro-Yerevan separatists for nearly three decades.

The conflict has seen ties sour between traditional allies Russia and Armenia, with Yerevan accusing the Kremlin of failing to protect it in the face of a security threat from Azerbaijan.

After the loss of Karabakh, Yerevan has sought to forge new security alliances by deepening ties with the West.

On Tuesday, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia James O'Brien issued a joint statement saying Washington and Yerevan have agreed to "upgrade the status of our bilateral dialogue to a Strategic Partnership Commission".

Last month, Yerevan returned to Azerbaijan four frontier villages which it had captured in the 1990s.

The move, which Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has defended as aimed at securing a definitive peace deal with Baku, sparked a wave of mass protests in Armenia.