Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other on Wednesday of violating a ceasefire after their worst clashes since a 2020 war called into question a faltering peace process between the archenemies.

Russia announced on Tuesday that it had negotiated a ceasefire after fighting that left at least 100 Azerbaijani and Armenian soldiers dead.

But on Wednesday, the Armenian Defense Ministry said “the enemy has restarted its attack using artillery, mortars and large caliber firearms towards Jermuk, Verin Shorzha” on the border.

“Despite a clear reaction to the situation from the international community, the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan continues its aggression against the territory of Armenia, targeting both military and civilian infrastructure,” the statement said on Wednesday.

Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said Armenian forces “violated the ceasefire… and shelled Azerbaijani positions near Kelbayar and Lachin with mortars and artillery”.

Tuesday’s escalation came as Yerevan’s closest ally Moscow is distracted from its six-month-old war against Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said tensions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border “definitely continued” on Wednesday.

He said a delegation from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – a Moscow-led grouping of former Soviet republics of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – will come to Yerevan later on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the Armenian Security Council asked for military assistance from Moscow, which under the treaty is obliged to defend Armenia in the event of a foreign invasion.

The Ukraine conflict has shifted the balance of power in the region as Russia — which deployed thousands of peacekeepers in the region after the 2020 war — finds itself increasingly isolated.

The European Union has since led the normalization process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which has included peace talks, border demarcation and the reopening of transport links.

Analyst Gela Vasadze from the Georgian Center for Strategic Analysis said the latest escalation “did the EU’s efforts to bring Baku and Yerevan closer to a peace deal”.

“The Brussels accords are now effectively suspended,” he said, adding that the clashes “have further radicalized public opinion in both countries.”

At EU-brokered talks in Brussels in May and April, Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia agreed to “push talks forward” on a future peace deal.

Emotions ran high among the families of wounded Armenian soldiers in Yerevan as they gathered outside a military hospital on Tuesday night.

“We must fight for our country, our homeland and our country. Victory will be ours, if not today then tomorrow. We are unbreakable,” one of the relatives, Sokrat Khachaturyan, 65, told AFP.

Economist Arman Mkhitaryan said that “a new war was to be expected, of course, given the accumulation of Azerbaijanis (military on the border).”

“The capabilities and potential of the current (Armenian) government are not sufficient to meet today’s challenges.”

On Tuesday, Armenia asked world leaders for help in the recent fighting.

The European Union, the United States, France, Russia, Iran and Turkey all expressed concern about the escalation and called for an end to the fighting.

The neighbors fought two wars – in the 1990s and 2020 – over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-populated enclave of Azerbaijan.

The six-week fighting in the fall of 2020 claimed the lives of more than 6,500 soldiers from both sides and ended in a Russian-brokered ceasefire.

Under the deal, Armenia ceded parts of territory it had controlled for decades, and Moscow dispatched about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile ceasefire, which analyst Vasadze called “neither war nor peace.”

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.