Azerbaijan announced Thursday that it had arrested a former head of the Nagorno-Karabakh separatist enclave, which it took control of following Baku's lightning attack last month. Azerbaijan said it arrested Arayek Harutyunyan, who resigned shortly before the Baku attack, “on suspicion of waging an aggressive war” against Azerbaijan and committing war crimes, the prosecutor and security service said in a joint statement.

On Wednesday, the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs "strongly" condemned Azerbaijan for arresting a number of separatist leaders from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Several representatives of the former authorities and military leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh were arrested, including Ruben Vardanyan, who headed the separatist government in the region between November 2022 and February.

Russian presidential spokesman (Kremlin), Dmitry Peskov, said yesterday, Wednesday, that a Russian diplomat held a meeting in the Turkish city of Istanbul with representatives of the European Union and the United States regarding the Karabakh conflict last September.

Commenting on media reports about “secret” talks between Russia, the European Union, and the United States, Peskov said, in a press conference held in the Russian capital, Moscow, that “talks regarding Karabakh actually took place, but it did not happen as described by the Western media.”

Separately, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also confirmed these contacts, saying that representatives from Brussels, Moscow and Washington held a “normal exchange of views on Karabakh during the meeting,” without giving further details.