Azerbaijan’s Defense Minister Safar Abiyev issued more war threats against Armenia and Karabakh on February 25 as he pointed out that “for 15 years diplomacy has not achieved any concrete results and Azerbaijan cannot wait another 15 years.”

“Now it’s the military’s turn and the threat is growing every day. If aggressor Armenia does not end its occupation of Azerbaijan's territory, the beginning of a great war in the South Caucasus is inevitable,” said Abiyev.

Threats to renew hostilities in fact are the only argument of Azerbaijan in the negotiating process over the Karabakh settlement. In the beginning official Baku cited legal arguments and tried to prove its rights to the territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. But after the recognition of the independence of Kosovo to the detriment of Serbia’s territorial integrity, after statements by the United States and a number of countries that they respect the integrity of Azerbaijan, but are convinced that the status of Karabakh should be determined as a result of negotiations, Baku has run out of legal arguments.

The statements made by the Azeri defense minister came amid continuing reports from the frontline about violations of the ceasefire regime. The NKR Defense Ministry reported that on February 24-25 overnight and during the day the Azerbaijani side shelled the Karabakh positions in all directions of the line of contact from automatic machine-guns, machine-guns and sniper rifles. No casualties on the Armenian side have been reported as the Karabakh forces took “retaliatory action”. The Karabakh Defense Ministry issues such reports nearly every day.

In its threats Azerbaijan should consider the experience of the August 2008 Russo-Georgian war over South Ossetia, says John Hopkins University scholar Svante Cornell, who commented on the possibility of Azerbaijan’s new aggression.

“Naturally, I cannot rule out the possibility of Azerbaijan’s aggression against the Armenian side in the long-term prospect, nor do I say that Baku today is in a position to take Karabakh,” he said.

Analysts link the intensified war rhetoric in Azerbaijan with the Armenian-Turkish negotiations in which Turkey demands an expedited settlement of the conflict in favor of its regional ethnic ally Azerbaijan as a condition for opening the border with Armenia, which it closed in 1993 in response to Armenian military successes in the Karabakh war. Cornell thinks that the withdrawal of Armenian troops from one or two districts to the south of Karabakh will be sufficient for the Armenian-Turkish process to return to the natural course. Experts do not exclude that Azerbaijan will initiate local military actions (by arrangement with the mediators) in order to get the pullback of Armenian troops from one or two districts.