Turkey’s state run TRT news channel declared in a tweet slugged “Breaking News” Wednesday that Azerbaijan had declared victory in its ongoing war with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. The conflict entered its sixth week with reports of indiscriminate attacks on both sides, which the UN says could amount to war crimes.
TRT deleted the tweet soon after it emerged that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was merely repeating claims in an interview with Italy’s La Repubblica that he has been making for some time: that his country has prevailed in the worst outbreak of hostilities between the former Soviet states in the southern Caucasus since they first went to war over the predominantly Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan in 1991.