Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev demanded on Sunday that Armenia set a timetable for withdrawing from the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding Azeri territories, and said Azerbaijan would not cease military action until that happened.

Aliyev, in a televised address, said Azerbaijan had waited 30 years to recover its lands. “Nagorno-Karabakh is Azeri territory. We must return and we will return,” he said.

In a related development, Eighteen Nagorno-Karabakh civilians were killed by fire from Azeri forces and more than 90 were wounded in the past week, RIA Novosti news agency cited an official in the breakaway region as saying on Sunday.

The fighting began last Sunday and has surged to its worst level since the 1990s, when some 30,000 people were killed.

Earlier on Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for an immediate ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh and said Moscow was ready to help seek a solution to the conflict via the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

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