Armenia's prime minister calls for Russian peacekeepers to halt war in Nagorno Karabakh

Armenia's prime minister has said that he will accept Russian peacekeepers in the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh if it ends his country's increasingly costly war with Azerbaijan. In an interview with the Telegraph, Nikol Pashinyan said that a neutral force of Russian troops was now the "optimal solution" to the conflict, which appears to be tilting decisively in Azerbaijan's favour. His willingness to hand Moscow such a key role in Nagorno Karabakh's future may be seen as a tacit sign of desperation by Armenia, which has lost more than 1,000 troops and at least 100 tanks in just one month of fighting. Azerbaijan, which has superior drone weaponry and military backing from Turkey, has already retaken large tracts of Armenian-controlled land and appears intent on recapturing the entire territory. While Azerbaijan has already rejected the idea of Russian peacekeepers, Armenia now sees them as the only way of preventing further losses of land and lives. "I am in favour of deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the conflict zone," said Mr Pashinyan in an interview in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. "But the problem is that deployment of Russian peacekeepers in the conflict zone needs to be acceptable to all sides of the conflict."