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Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiated a ceasefire to end the outbreak of fighting that killed 155 soldiers on both sides, a senior Armenian official said earlier on Thursday.
Armenian Security Council Secretary Amen Grigoryan announced the truce in a televised speech, saying the truce was brought in five hours earlier and took effect at 8 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
A previous ceasefire brokered by Russia on Tuesday quickly failed.
The truce announcement comes after two days of heavy fighting, marking the largest outbreak of hostilities between the two longtime rivals in nearly two years.
Shortly before Mr. Grigoryan’s statement, thousands of protesters took to the streets of the Armenian capital, accusing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of betraying his country by trying to appease Azerbaijan and demanding his resignation.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have accused each other of hostilities, with Armenian authorities accusing Baku of unprovoked aggression and Azerbaijani officials saying their country is responding to Armenian shelling.
Mr Pashinyan said 105 soldiers had been killed in the country since fighting broke out early on Tuesday, while Azerbaijan said it lost 50.
Azerbaijani authorities said they were ready to unilaterally hand over the bodies of up to 100 Armenian soldiers.
The former Soviet state has been locked in a decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been in Armenian-backed Armenia since the end of the separatist war in 1994 under the control of the ethnic army.
In a six-week war in 2020, Azerbaijan has recaptured large swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories controlled by Armenian troops.
More than 6,700 people were killed in the fighting, which ended in a Russia-brokered peace deal. Under the agreement, Moscow deployed about 2,000 soldiers to the region as peacekeepers.
Mr. Pashinyan said Wednesday that Azerbaijani forces have occupied 10 square kilometers (nearly 4 square meters) of Armenia’s territory since the fighting began.
He told lawmakers that his government had requested military support from Russia under a friendship treaty between the two countries, as well as assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
“Our allies are Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organization,” Mr Pashinyan said, adding that the collective security agreement stipulates that aggression against one member is aggression against all.
“We do not see military intervention as the only possibility because there are political and diplomatic options,” Mr Pashinyan told his country’s parliament.
He told lawmakers that Armenia is ready to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity in a future peace treaty, provided it relinquishes control of areas of Armenia occupied by its military.
Some in the opposition saw the statement as a sign of Mr Pashinyan’s willingness to bow to Azerbaijan’s demands and recognize Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Thousands of angry protesters quickly poured into the government headquarters, accusing Pashinyan of treason and demanding his resignation.
Mr Pashinyan angrily denied reports that he had signed an agreement to accept Azerbaijan’s demands as an “information attack”.
Reacting to the uproar, Nagorno-Karabakh leader Arayik Harutyunyan said the region would not agree to join Azerbaijan and would continue to push for its independence.
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