At the border, Azerbaijan and Armenia swap captives

To improve tensions, Azerbaijan and Armenia exchanged prisoners of war at their border on Wednesday. In return, Azerbaijan released 32 Armenians, the majority of whom had been detained in late 2020. Armenia released the two Azerbaijani troops whom it had been holding since April 2023.

The removal of troops from Armenia and Azerbaijan's shared border was reportedly under discussion, according to a report earlier on Wednesday by Russia's TASS news agency, however, no decision had been made as of yet. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Facebook that "thirty-one personnel from Armenia's armed forces captured in 2020–2023 and one serviceman captured in Nagorno-Karabakh in September have crossed the Azerbaijani–Armenian border and are on Armenian territory." In the last thirty years, the neighbors in the South Caucasus have engaged in two wars over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region that is a part of Azerbaijan but where ethnic Armenians gained de facto independence in the 1990s.

Following a swift onslaught by Azerbaijan in September, the majority of Karabakh's 120,000 ethnic Armenian residents fled to Armenia. The two parties stated they "reconfirm their intention to normalize relations and to reach a peace treaty based on respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity" when they announced the scheduled prisoner swap last week.

The European Union and the United States, who have been trying for decades to get the two nations to sign a peace treaty to resolve unresolved problems like boundary delineation, hailed the deal. Following its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union included both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Although Russia views itself as the region's security guarantee, the conflict in Ukraine has overextended and diverted it throughout the last two years, contributing to a fall in its authority.