YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 14, ARMENPRESS. The Representative of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Thomas de Waal has published an article in BBC, where he reflected on the downing of the helicopter of the Karabakh Air Force during a training flight by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces. As reports “Armenpress”, in the article titled “Nagorno-Karabakh: Helicopter downing threatens shaky truce” Thomas de Waal particularly underscored that the shooting down of the helicopter on the ceasefire line is the worst incident of its kind in more than 20 years of the truce that ended the war of the early 1990s.

“Three Armenians were killed, and the Azerbaijani officer who shot down the helicopter was given a medal for courage.

It is a very disturbing development that follows a serious upsurge of fighting in the summer in which more than 20 soldiers were killed on both sides.

A video taken from the Azerbaijani side shows a missile being fired and one of the two helicopters bursting into flames to shouts of excitement from the Azerbaijani soldiers.

There is no military logic to these attacks. A local commander can be responsible for small arms fire, but use of heavier weapons takes a decision from politicians higher up.

These attacks are all about showing off your strength.

These incidents are an illustration of the increased militarisation of the Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire line over the last 20 years - the most militarised zone in Europe.

Helicopters, attack aircraft and drones fill the skies while there is heavy artillery behind the lines, where up to 20,000 soldiers sit in World War One-style trenches.

Azerbaijan, in particular, is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of oil and gas revenues into buying heavy weapons.

Meanwhile, the international presence is just as it was in 1994: only six monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observe the ceasefire along a line of 100 miles (160km), plus the increasingly tense international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The two presidents, Ilham Aliev and Serzh Sarkisian, recently resumed face-to-face talks and have met three times since August, most recently in Paris two weeks ago.

That is good for the faltering negotiation process, but the mediators are pessimistic about any hopes of a breakthrough, especially given the background of the war in Ukraine that also divides Russia, one of the three negotiators, from France and the United States.