A mass fight between the students of Azerbaijani and Armenian origin took place at the People Friendship University of Russia during the May Day celebrations in Moscow on Tuesday.

Two groups of young men with national flags of Azerbaijan and Armenia cried out "Karabakh! Karabakh!".

The fight started during an event titled "Planet South West" held at the university on May 1. Nagorno Karabakh, a republic disputed by the two countries, was on maps of Armenia and Azerbaijan that hang in pavilions of both republics.

According to a Moscow police spokesman, around 3 p.m. fights started to break out among different groups of the audience, making them hard to suppress. Approximately one hundred people took part in the brawl, police estimate.

The fight was subsequently stopped by the local security guards and the OMON riot police, however the participants fled to a dormitory and continued fighting, reports say. One man was hospitalized with a gun wound. Several others also received minor wounds but were treated on the spot. Over 20 people were detained, all of them foreign citizens, police said.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a de facto independent republic in the South Caucasus, predominately populated by Armenians while officially being a part of Azerbaijan, became a source of a violent dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, culminating in the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Since the end of the war in 1994, most of the republic, as well as several regions of Azerbaijan around it remain under joint Armenian and NKR Defense Forces control.

By Adam Klesczewski