At least two Armenian soldiers were killed in clashes with troops from neighboring Azerbaijan on Friday, but the former Soviet republics gave conflicting death tolls and disputed who was to blame, the Daily Mail reported on Friday.
Sporadic clashes between the two countries have thwarted international efforts to end a territorial dispute that broke out in the dying years of the Soviet Union and has killed about 30,000 people.
Armenia's Defense Ministry accused the Azeri side of killing two of its soldiers. "All responsibility for escalation of the situation and its consequences lies with the political and military leadership of Azerbaijan," it said in a statement.
Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry, meanwhile, accused Armenian soldiers of trying to cross the border and said 12 of them had been killed and 20 wounded. It said the Armenians were the first to open fire, and there were no Azeri casualties.
Skirmishes around the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and along the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan underline the risk of broader conflict in the South Caucasus, a region criss-crossed by oil and gas pipelines.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region within Azerbaijan, is controlled by ethnic Armenians who form the majority of its population. The enclave's defense ministry said three Azeri soldiers were killed in skirmishes with ethnic Armenian separatists on Thursday night.
According to reports in Armenia, two Armenian soldiers were killed and one was wounded in similar clashes earlier this week.