YEREVAN: The US and Russia will push the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia to shore up a fragile truce when the arch-foes meet on Monday for the first time since a surge in violence over the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region.
Four days of fighting in Nagorny Karabakh in early April killed at least 110 people as a festering conflict over the territory flared into the worst violence since a 1994 ceasefire that halted a brutal war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry are to hold talks Monday in Vienna with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisian, in a bid to defuse tensions between the two former Soviet neighbours.
A truce hammered out by Moscow halted the latest bloodshed but the situation remains on a knife-edge, with both sides accusing the other of violating the agreement.
"For now, the main aim for the mediators is to just calm down the tensions along the frontline," Armenia-based political analyst Hrant Melik-Shahnazaryan told AFP.
"The signing of any documents or reaching of any other sort of agreements is highly unlikely."
Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a feud over Nagorny Karabakh since Armenian separatists seized the landlocked territory from Azerbaijan in a war that claimed some 30,000 lives in the early 1990s.
Since the 1994 ceasefire, the two sides have regularly exchanged fire across the frontline, but last month's violence was unprecedented since the shaky truce took effect.
With peace efforts spearheaded by Russia, the US and France stuttering to a halt in recent years, both sides in the conflict began rearming heavily, with energy-rich Azerbaijan especially spending vast sums on new weaponry.
And yet, despite increasingly feverish rhetoric from the rivals, the recent flare-up still appeared to catch the international community by surprise.
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