Fighting escalated sharply on Monday between Azerbaijan and its ethnic Armenian mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and at least 29 people were killed in the second day of heavy clashes. The two sides pounded each other with rockets and artillery in the fiercest round of the decades-old conflict in more than a quarter of a century. “This is a life-and-death war,” Arayik Harutyunyan, the Nagorno-Karabakh leader, told a briefing. Any move to all-out war could drag in major regional powers Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, which provides vital support to the enclave and is its lifeline to the outside world, while Ankara backs its own ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the ceasefire to the war in the 1990s. The fighting is taking place along all sections of the front line,” said Olesya Vartanyan, senior analyst […]