Vance Venturing Into Karabakh Today : Peace mission: The U.N. envoy’s visit to the region so far has found few signs of readiness to end the hostilities.

Under the protection of a promised cease-fire, U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance will venture into the war zone of Nagorno-Karabakh today to cap a visit to Azerbaijan and Armenia that has turned up few signs of readiness by either combatant to make a lasting peace.

Armenia has agreed to a one-week cease-fire brokered by Tehran, according to reports from Iran on Thursday, and Azerbaijan confirmed its earlier consent to the truce.

But Armenia’s Foreign Ministry also initiated a political offensive by declaring that if Azerbaijan does not lift its blockade of surface transportation routes leading into Armenia, the war in Nagorno-Karabakh will inevitably spread.

In addition, Azerbaijan continued to reject the notion of sending U.N. peacekeeping troops to the region, while Armenia keeps insisting that only outside peacekeeping forces can stop the bloodshed.

Vance, sent to the region in hopes he could advance the cause of peace as he did in Yugoslavia, does not plan to begin actually mediating between Azerbaijan and Armenia on this trip, but he appears to be getting a sense of the depth of the long-running Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Armenian and Azerbaijani militants have been fighting over mountainous Nagorno-Karabakh, a fertile enclave within Azerbaijan that is populated mainly by Armenians, for four years. The conflict has worsened dramatically since troops of the former Soviet Union, who had once served as a buffer, began pulling out.

“It is absolutely essential to my mission that I have the opportunity to see for myself and listen with my own ears,” Vance told reporters in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. From there, he was traveling to the Azerbaijani city of Gyandzhi, arriving in Nagorno-Karabakh today.

President Levon Ter-Petrosyan of Armenia had been expected to fly to Kiev on Thursday for talks with acting Azerbaijani President Yagub Mamedov. But he canceled the trip to protest the continuing Azerbaijani transport blockade, which has left Armenia in such dire economic straits that its government proclaimed a state of economic emergency Wednesday.

Armenia has begun conserving fuel so strictly that the entire republic’s power supply will reportedly be switched off 12 hours per day, in two six-hour periods.

Because of the blockade, more than 100,000 tons of fuel intended for Armenia have remained in Azerbaijan, Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said. It complained that Turkey, too, has held up American humanitarian aid shipments destined for Armenia.

Armenian Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian reiterated Thursday that any solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem must include lifting the blockade, and he also pressed again for outside peacekeepers. “In connection with any cease-fire there must be a simultaneous dispatch not only of observers, but also of peacekeeping troops,” he said.

But Prime Minister Gasan Gasanov of Azerbaijan said his country will maintain the blockade as a way of calling attention to Armenia’s “behavior” in Karabakh, according to the independent Nega news agency.

Azerbaijan has said that no peace is possible in Nagorno-Karabakh until all Armenian militants withdraw from the region.

Air Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, commander of the joint forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States, proposed Thursday that instead of calling on the United Nations for peacekeepers, the Commonwealth create its own force.

“I calculate that such forces for keeping order within the Commonwealth will be created in the nearest future,” he said.

Meanwhile, however, the bloodshed in Nagorno-Karabakh continued, with heavy shelling of the capital, Stepanakert, leaving one person dead and several injured, according to Russian Television.

Armenian attacks on the few remaining Azerbaijani-populated villages in the enclave also reportedly continued.

The Iranian-brokered truce, according to reports from Tehran and Paris, is to take effect before dawn today.