On the night of January 9, around 9:30 p.m, an Azerbaijani sniper fatally wounded Aramayis Voskanyan, born in 1996. Voskanyan was from the city of Kavar in the Gegharkounik region and a student at the Yerevan State Agrarian University. He would have turned 20 on January 26.
Even though the NKR Defense Ministry reported that the situation on the Contact Line was relatively calm over the holidays, Armenia’s Defense Ministry spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan evaluates this recent incident as yet another attempt from the Azerbaijani side to escalate the situation after the establishment of relative stability at the border. Hovhannisyan said, “The Armenian armed forces will retaliate and Azerbaijan will, yet again, be held responsible for the intensification of Armenia’s armed defense and any future developments that might result from it”.
Hovhannisyan’s comment comes after an unprecedented number of ceasefire violations were reported during December of last year, over a period leading up to the meeting of Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents in Bern, Switzerland. On December 8, 2015, Azerbaijani armed forces shelled the Contact Line with tanks, an incident that was a first since the establishment of the ceasefire regime in 1994.
