Armenians Release 10 Ex-Soviet Army Officers : Civil war: Militants had held hostages for four days, demanding ammunition for battle against Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Ten officers of the former Soviet Army were released by their Armenian captors early this morning, a spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States said.

The Armenian militants had held them hostage for four days, demanding ammunition for their battle against Azerbaijanis in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“According to our information, no arms or ammunition have been given to the captors in exchange for the hostages,” Vladimir S. Nikanorov, spokesman for the Commonweath Armed Forces, said.

The standoff was complicated because neither the Armenian government nor the military leadership of the Commonwealth of Independent States could determine the identity of the captors or where they were keeping the hostages.

“The people who took the hostages do not want to negotiate with the military, nor do they want to negotiate with the Armenian government because they trust neither,” said Levon Zurabyan, an aide to Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan.

The officers were taken hostage Sunday when dozens of armed Armenians surrounded an antiaircraft base belonging to the Commonwealth army outside the city of Artik, Armenia, near the Turkish border. Two soldiers and three attackers were killed in the ensuing skirmish.

The captors had threatened to kill the officers unless they were supplied with 2 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 10,000 mortar rounds and a supply of short-range missiles. The military, in turn, warned that it would besiege the region around Artik if the hostages were not freed.

“The armed forces will not remain a meek subject of political extremism and militant nationalism,” Maj. Gen. Nikolai Stolyarov told a Moscow news conference before he headed to Yerevan on Wednesday to try to negotiate the release of his fellow officers.

Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, a hero of the Afghanistan war, said the hostage-taking showed that Russia’s southern neighbors were out of control and the Commonwealth should withdraw its troops from the region. “Let them settle their own problems,” he said on Russian television. “We’ve had enough of their taking our forces hostage!”

The Armenian leadership met with Commonwealth military representatives on Wednesday and announced a decision to take the offenders to court and punish them severely.

While not justifying the actions of their countrymen, Armenian officials have said they understand their motives. They say that the individuals involved are not terrorists but refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh. They fear that the former Soviet army is helping Azerbaijan establish a firm military superiority in the area.

The neighboring republics have been fighting off and on over the last four years over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. As many as 2,000 people have been killed. Leaders of the republics have repeatedly called for a political solution in the intractable conflict.

Politicians in Turkey, Iran and Russia have launched efforts to bring peace to the region. Despite calls for peace, the intensity of the warfare in the mountainous region south of Russia has increased markedly in recent weeks, and both sides have tried to improve their arsenals with weapons and ammunition from Kremlin military bases in the region. Commonwealth forces, which had a calming influence in the region, completed their pullout from Nagorno-Karabakh last week.

The attack on the antiaircraft base in Artik followed news reports that the Azerbaijanis had stolen large quantities of ammunition from a Commonwealth base in Azerbaijan without much resistance from the military.

The head of the local government in Artik said that the men who besieged the base were not local residents but a gang from Askeran, a predominantly Armenian city in Nagorno-Karabakh that has been shelled heavily by Azerbaijani fighters in recent days. The people of Artik, however, are suffering for their action, he said.

“The soldiers from the base are now literally terrorizing the population of the town,” said Pyotr Makiyan, chairman of the local government. “Six helicopters have been hovering threateningly right over our rooftops. At night, bursts of automatic fire come from the base, randomly hitting private houses. All of our people are hiding in their houses. The streets are deserted. People are afraid to come out for fear that solders might vent their anger at them.”

The soldiers also have distributed leaflets threatening the local residents, Makiyan said. He quoted the leaflets as saying: “We warn the town authorities, leadership of enterprises, residents of neighborhood houses who render assistance to the bandits that, if anyone opens fire on the military base from any place in town, this place will be destroyed with antiaircraft artillery fire.”