Azerbaijan on Thursday accused Armenian forces of firing at its military positions in the autonomous Nakhchivan region amid peace efforts.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Armenian troops fired in the direction of the village of Yukhari Buzgov in the region's Babek district.

It indicated that the incident took place at 7:50 p.m. local time and said response measures had been taken by Azerbaijani units.

The incident comes as the South Caucasus rivals have been working to sign a peace treaty to end one of the former Soviet Union's longest-running conflicts, which broke out between the two sides over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the late 1980s.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan retook control of Karabakh, ending the region's de facto independence from Baku that it had won in the early 1990s and prompting virtually its entire ethnic Armenian population to flee to Armenia.

Since then, the two sides have been negotiating a peace treaty and demarcating their 1,000-kilometer (625-mile) shared border, which is closed and heavily militarized.

After several months of stalled negotiations, Armenia last month returned four ruined Azerbaijani villages it had occupied since the early 1990s, clearing a major hurdle in the ongoing talks.

But the move has sparked anti-government protests in Armenia.

101 injured in rallies

Armenian authorities said Thursday that 101 people were injured during protests outside the parliament building in Yerevan.

Both protesters and police officers were among the injured, the country's Health Ministry said, adding that 85 were discharged after getting first aid, while the remainder were hospitalized.

On Wednesday evening, police began using stun grenades following a scuffle with opposition activists who tried to block the parliament building, demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation.

The demand stems from Yerevan's defeat in the Karabakh conflict, which many Armenians see as a national humiliation.

Critics have accused Pashinyan and his government of incompetence in various governance areas, including economic management, handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and failure to implement promised reforms.

There is also general political discontent among certain sectors of the population and political groups who oppose Pashinyan's pro-Western policies.