Andrzej Kasprzyk: We played a deterrent role

The October 17 monitoring exercise had to be abandoned due to shooting. Shots were fired near the observation points and it was hard to determine what was happening. It was expedient to stop monitoring for safety reasons, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk said, when commenting on the results of the OSCE mission’s October 25 monitoring of the line of contact near the village of Leonarkh in Martakert region of Nagorno Karabakh.

In an interview with Public Television of the NKR, A. Kasprzyk also touched upon the recent incident at the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, in which one soldier was killed and three others received injuries. Kasprzyk said he received information 40 minutes after the incident when shots were still being fired, and he took some actions to stop the shooting: he contacted people who could influence the situation.

In his words, monitoring of the line of contact of the armed forces of Karabakh and Azerbaijan has a positive impact on the situation and sometimes contains tension.

Andrzej Kasprzyk said there have been cases when – amid increasing comments about shots - there was a threat of destabilization in some sections, but they played a deterrent role.