Armenian regular army units will withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh in September. Armen Grigoryan, secretary of the country's Security Council, said this in an interview with Armenpress. He added that conscripts in Karabakh will still be conscripted into the defense army.

"As a result of the war, a number of units of the armed forces of the Republic of Armenia entered Nagorno-Karabakh to help the defense forces. After the ceasefire they are returning to Armenia. This process is close to completion and will end in September," Grigoryan said.

The Security Council Secretary stressed that this applies only to units of the regular army and not to the so-called "defense army" of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Grigoryan added that the deployment of Russian "peacekeeping forces" in Karabakh should be a security guarantee.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars, in 2020 and in the 1990s, over Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Six weeks of fighting in the fall of 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered cease-fire agreement.

Under the agreement, Armenia ceded parts of territory it had controlled for decades, and russia sent some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the ceasefire.

After the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, an increasingly isolated Moscow lost its status as the main mediator in the conflict.

Since then, the European Union has led the process of normalizing Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, including peace talks, border delimitation and resumption of transport links.

In July 2022, the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan held their first bilateral talks in a long time.

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the conflict has claimed some 30,000 lives.