Armenia has announced martial law and total military mobilization after the confrontation in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an Armenian separatist region in Azerbaijan that has been for a long time a point of conflict between the two countries.

Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday: The government has decided to declare martial law and a total mobilization. Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, promised in a previous time to secure victory on Armenian forces.

In fact, tensions increased between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Sunday morning about confrontations in which Yerevan declared that Azeri forces attacked the region of Nagorno-Karabakh and Baku accused Armenian forces of attacking Azeri military and civilian positions.

The damages were unclear however the defense ministry of Armenia reported that an unspecified number of civilians had been killed by Azerbaijan’s forces.

The two sides were in conflict about Azerbaijan’s breakaway, mainly the ethnic Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh that announced independence during a conflict that appears as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Despite a ceasefire that was made in 1994, Azerbaijan and Armenia regularly accuse each other of offensive around Nagorno-Karabakh and along the separate Azeri-Armenian frontier.

The defense ministry of Armenia declared that its troops had damaged three tanks and shot down two helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles in response to an assault on civilian targets including the regional capital of Stepanakert. The ministry said in a statement: Our response will be proportionate, and the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan bears full responsibility for the situation. It also reported there would be an appropriate military and political response.

Azerbaijan dismissed the Armenian defense ministry statement, declaring that it had complete advantage over the enemy on the front. A senior adviser to Aliyev, Hikmet Hajiyev, accused Armenian forces of launching deliberate and targeted attacks along the front line.

Furthermore, Azerbaijan’s defense ministry declared that Armenia had hit civilian settlements and military positions along the contact line, which is a heavily-mined no-man’s-land that separates the forces backed by Armenian from Azeri troops in the region. It declared that certain civilians had been killed as a result of the intensive shelling by Armenia, and that Azerbaijan had taken vengeful measures.

It also reported that Azerbaijan’s army launched a counter-offensive operation along the entire front to suppress the combat activity of the armed forces of Armenia and ensure the safety of the civilian population.