Slowly, then all at once

The final act in the tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh’s collapse

Story by Teresa Di Mauro for The Beet. Edited by Eilish Hart.

Until two weeks ago, the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh was home to the breakaway Republic of Artsakh. Although internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, the region and its predominantly ethnic Armenian population had been under a de facto separatist government since the 1990s. This resulted from a bloody war — fought from 1988 to 1994— that saw Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia pitted against Azerbaijan, coinciding with the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War, as it is now known, killed around 30,000 people on both sides and displaced more than a million others as Armenians left Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis fled Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and seven adjacent territories that came under Armenian control.

In the decades after the 1994 ceasefire, intermittent deadly clashes continued along the line of separation, escalating into intense fighting in April 2016 and then all-out war in September 2020. The hostilities lasted just six weeks but resulted in more than 7,000 military and around 170 civilian casualties. More than 130,000 people were displaced from their homes, mostly Karabakh Armenians who returned by the thousands after a peace deal was reached. Three years on, we are witnessing a mass exodus once again — one that marks the end of the self-declared Artsakh Republic. For The Beet, journalist Teresa Di Mauro recounts how the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh happened slowly, and then all at once.

This story first appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.

Lusine Hambardzumyan was at her office in Stepanakert when Azerbaijani forces began attacking Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19.

“The children were at school, and I was sitting at work. Suddenly, we heard some loud, intense sound of bombs. It was horrific,” Lusine recalls.

The strikes were a frightening disruption to Lusine’s already fragile daily routine. The Nagorno-Karabakh region — an enclave internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but home to a self-governing and predominantly ethnic Armenian population — had been under an Azerbaijani blockade for more than nine months. The resulting humanitarian crisis was dire, and months of contending with shortages of food and other essentials had left Lusine and her compatriots exhausted.

As Azerbaijani troops blitzed the regional capital with drones and artillery, videos showing damage to Stepanakert’s residential areas slowly began appearing online. Widespread Internet outages were hindering communication, leaving locals cut off from each other as the offensive unfolded around them. Within hours, Azerbaijani troops had broken through the front line and encircled several of Nagorno-Karabakh’s strategic settlements.

I don’t know what is happening. I am at the university. They’re bombing us,” Larisa Nersisyan wrote in a message that reached The Beet’s correspondent hours after the attack began. Larisa, a student, was in class at Artsakh State University at the time and couldn’t get in contact with her loved ones. “I don’t know where my family members are. There is no connection here,” she said.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s unrecognized government, the Republic of Artsakh, capitulated within 24 hours, announcing on September 20 that it had agreed to a ceasefire.

In a televised speech, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev declared that Baku had restored its sovereignty with an “iron fist.”

‘A humanitarian catastrophe’

The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh didn’t actually happen overnight.

The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the region, which goes back decades, escalated into a full-blown war in the early 1990s and again in the fall of 2020.

The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War lasted 44 days, ending with a Moscow-brokered ceasefire that saw Azerbaijan regain part of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories it had lost in the 1990s. To maintain the ceasefire, Russia deployed peacekeepers to the region. But this didn’t prevent intermittent skirmishes and tensions were rising again by 2022. That September, renewed hostilities along the border with Azerbaijan spilled over into towns in southeastern Armenia and left hundreds of soldiers dead.

Just a few short weeks later, however, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held talks with Azerbaijan’s Aliyev in Prague, after which they released a joint statement recognizing the territorial integrity of each other’s countries. According to Ahmad Alili, thedirector of the Baku-based Caucasus Policy Analysis Centre, this signaled to Azerbaijan that the recent flare-up had “paid off.”

Then, in December, Baku-backed activists blocked the Lachin Corridor — the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. The blockade left Karabakh residents stranded without access to essential supplies and services, paving the way for a humanitarian crisis. International calls to end the blockade poured in from the European Union, the United States, Russia, and the United Nations. But Baku ignored them, arguing that Nagorno-Karabakh was an internal affair.

After Azerbaijan installed a checkpoint on the Lachin Corridor in April, Pashinyancondemned the move as part of a “policy of ethnic cleansing.” Nevertheless, the prime minister continued to reiterate Armenia’s readiness to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan — with the caveat that any peace agreement must ensure the “rights and security” of Karabakh Armenians and provide “international guarantees” for direct talks between Baku and Stepanakert.

Karabakh’s human rights ombudsman, Gegham Stepanyan, reported the first death from starvation on August 15. In an interview with The Beet about a month later — coincidentally on the very eve of Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive — Stepanyan said Nagorno-Karabakh was experiencing “a humanitarian catastrophe.”

“People are not able to find food for their families,” he explained. “We also face huge problems in the healthcare sphere [...] All pharmacies are completely empty. All surgeries are suspended.”

Humanitarian aid supplies through the Lachin Corridor had also resumed that day for the first time since June 15. But Stepanyan warned that the deliveries were woefully inadequate. “The 120,000 people of Nagorno-Karabakh, including 30,000 children, cannot rely on humanitarian aid for a long time,” he underscored.

‘Leaving would be like betrayal’

A month into the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade, in January 2023, President Aliyev suggested that anyone unwilling to take Azerbaijani citizenship should leave the region. “The road is not closed; it’s open,” he insisted. “They can leave. No one will hinder them.”

At this juncture, the prospect of leaving Nagorno-Karabakh was unthinkable to most local Armenians. And this remained the case even as the humanitarian situation deteriorated in the spring and summer of 2023. “Most of these people want to live here,” Stepanyan told The Beet on September 18. “They want to live in their homes. Everything they have is here.”

When interviewed in early September, both Lusine and Larisa said they and their families intended to stay. “The bodies of those who lost their lives in the 44-Day War are here,” Lusine said. “Leaving would be like betraying them. They gave their lives for us to live here. After the war, this place became like a sanctuary.”

Larisa said she dreamed of buying an apartment in Krkjan, the Stepanakert neighborhood where her mother grew up. “I have so many nice memories there. I used to have so much fun [there] as a child. That’s probably why I would like to live there,” she mused.

A week before Azerbaijan’s 24-hour offensive, political analyst Tigran Grigoryan, who heads the Regional Center for Democracy and Security in Yerevan, described the prospect of evacuations from the region as a “worst-case, catastrophic scenario.”

“That's one of the reasons nobody's talking about [evacuation] publicly. Nobody wants to legitimize this narrative because, for some actors, this might be like the easy solution,” said Grigoryan. “If this happens in the 21st century, with all the international principles, it would put an end to any notion of comprehensive goals in the South Caucasus,” he added. “It's impossible to talk about peace at the cost of one side.”

‘Violence, not diplomacy’

After the ceasefire announcement on September 20, Stepanyan reported that Azerbaijan’s offensive had killed at least 200 people in Nagorno-Karabakh, including at least 10 civilians, and wounded more than 400 others.

In turn, Azerbaijan’s Health Ministry said that 192 Azerbaijani troops were killed and 511 wounded, adding that one Azerbaijani civilian also died in the hostilities. “Overall, it's around 200 people — 200 young people in 24 hours,” Alili said, referring to Baku’s losses. “It shows that the [Azerbaijani] government wanted to finalize it as soon as possible.”

“Violence, not diplomacy, has always determined key outcomes in the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh,” wrote Thomas De Waal, a Carnegie Europe senior fellow, in an article for Foreign Affairs. He argued that Azerbaijan’s gains in the 2020 war had tilted international negotiations in Baku’s favor. Then, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine again changed the power dynamics in the South Caucasus.

“When the war in Ukraine started, one local observer told me Azerbaijan was [like a] young lady everyone wants to marry. And that was the case,” said Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the South Caucasus region. “Azerbaijan has become more important, not just for the European Union or some leaders in the Middle East, but also for Russia.”

This shift was on full display in the aftermath of Azerbaijan’s 24-hour offensive. While the U.S. and E.U. expressed concern and condemned the attack, Armenia’s purported key ally, Russia, demurred. Rebuffing accusations of inaction, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman pointed to Yerevan’s recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, adding that Russian peacekeepers in the region were working “night and day” to help evacuate civilians. Kremlin press guidelines (obtained by Meduza) even instructed state-controlled media to shift the blame for the assault onto Armenia and its Western “partners.”

Meanwhile, Armenian officials were sounding the alarm over the consequences of Azerbaijan’s actions. Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan described it as “the final act of [a] tragedy aimed at the forced exodus of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Indeed, despite Azerbaijani officials pledging to treat them as “equal citizens,” Karabakh Armenians feared reprisals and started fleeing the region en masse.

‘They lost everything’

On September 28, officials in Stepanakert announced that the Republic of Artsakh would formally dissolve itself as of January 1, 2024. By that point, more than 65,000 refugees had arrived in Armenia.

In the days that followed, this number swelled to more than 100,000. And Armenia found itself dealing with a humanitarian crisis for which it was completely unprepared — despite earlier claims that the country was ready to accommodate 40,000 displaced families.

“Most refugees we spoke to either had a temporary host family arrangement or nowhere to go at all,” Eurasianet reported on September 29.

“There are people spending days and nights on the streets, and the hygiene conditions are really bad,” said photographer Eugene Shalnov, who was covering the situation in the border town of Goris. “They lost everything they had, and many blame Armenia for not supporting them,” he added.

Earlier, the Armenian government had announced that it would offer a one-time payment of 100,000 drams (about $256) to each displaced person and allocate 360 million drams (just under $1 million) to regional governors to purchase humanitarian aid for refugees.

A U.N. mission arrived in Nagorno-Karabakh on October 1. But journalists were already reporting that the Stepanakert was a “ghost town.” According to Stepanyan, “the last bus from Artsakh” reached Goris that same day.

Larisa and Lusine, meanwhile, had both made their way to Yerevan. “The last days in Stepanakert were so chaotic. Everyone was waiting for fuel to be able to leave,” Larisa recalled. (Amid the chaos, a massive explosion at a fuel warehouse near Stepanakert had killed at least 170 people.)

“Thankfully, my family and I are together. We are all healthy, and that is the most important part,” said Lusine. “I am living with my mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, their eight-month-old child, my two sisters, and our grandmother. We are in a small apartment.”

‘The end of Nagorno-Karabakh as we knew it’

On October 2, Azerbaijan’s presidential office presented its reintegration plan for Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians. But according to the U.N. mission’s report, this population has dwindled to “between 50 and 1,000” people.

“I think there’s little doubt that we have seen the end of Nagorno-Karabakh as we knew it,” said Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at Chatham House, in an interview with Meduza. “The question now is whether there will be any Armenian presence left in the territory at all.”

Several international experts have suggested that the exodus of Karabakh Armenians constitutes the war crime of “deportation or forcible transfer” or even a crime against humanity. However, Azerbaijani officials have rejected any and all such accusations.

“We cannot accept accusations of ethnic cleansing or genocide,” Hikmet Hajiyev, a diplomatic advisor to Azerbaijan’s president, told AFP. “We opened the gate and respected their [civilians’] freedom of movement, freedom of choice.”

“Azerbaijan emphasizes that it is a civic nation, a multicultural nation that has cordial relations with different ethnic and religious minorities. But I think it’s a stretch to imagine that Karabakh Armenians could feel safe,” Broers told Meduza. “There is a very distinct and specific history the Karabakh Armenians have been through. And that’s why we have this discussion about security guarantees.”

According to Azerbaijan’s reintegration plan, Baku pledges to ensure the rights and security of Karabakh Armenians who accept Azerbaijani citizenship. But after years of official rhetoric propagating dehumanizing stereotypes and hatred, experts remain skeptical.

“Armenophobia legitimized Aliyev’s regime for decades because the image of the external enemy is what creates unity and neutralizes [internal] contradictions,” said Bahruz Samadov, an Azerbaijani political activist and doctoral candidate at Charles University in Prague.

“Peaceful coexistence can only be possible if this deep hatred is changed, but I don’t think official discourse needs this,” he continued. “In Azerbaijan, nationalism is the basis of the regime’s legitimacy.”

“They could not force us to live there,” said Larisa. “It would have been inhuman.”

Story by Teresa Di Mauro for The Beet

Edited by Eilish Hart