Last week a thirty-five year war was ignited. Hundreds of people died. Tens of thousands may have been displaced. The world, focused on the General Assembly of the United Nations and the war a Ukraine, barely noticed. On September 19, Azerbaijan began shelling cities and military bases in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that had long fought for independence. In less than a day, the self-proclaimed republic was effectively disarmed and forced to capitulate. Russian forces, ostensibly there to prevent just this kind of outcome, offered little or no resistance. The most generous reading of the situation is that they were caught off guard. The less generous thing is that Russia had given the go-ahead to the attack, perhaps in exchange for maintaining a military presence in the region.
The Karabakh conflict dates back to 1988. It foreshadowed a dozen others that would erupt in what was then the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Nagorno-Karabakh was, legally, an autonomous region within Azerbaijan, a constituent republic of the USSR. Mikhail GorbachevThe government loosened political restrictions, the Armenians of Karabakh demanded the right, which according to them was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution, of secession from Azerbaijan and joining Armenia, also a Soviet constituent republic. Moscow rejected the demand. Meanwhile, shootings between Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh sparked violence elsewhere. In February 1988, anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait left dozens dead. Two years later, a week of anti-Armenian violence in Baku, the historically multi-ethnic capital of Azerbaijan, killed dozens more. Thousands of ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, where their families had lived for generations. Some left on a plane chartered by chess champion Garry Kasparov, probably the best-known Azerbaijani Armenian, who was also leaving his homeland for good.
In 1991, the Soviet Union broke up and each of the fifteen constituent republics became a sovereign state. For Karabakh Armenians, this meant that any legal basis for their secessionist aspirations was gone. Nagorno-Karabakh became one of several ethnic enclaves in the post-Soviet space fighting for independence from the newly independent country of which they were a part: South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to break free from Georgia, the Transnistria region fought to separate from Moldova, Chechnya wanted out of Russia. By the early 1990s, each of these conflicts became a hot war. In all cases outside its own borders, Russia supported separatist movements and in most cases used the conflicts to deploy its own troops in the region. Two decades later, Russia used the same playbook to encourage armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh lasted until 1994. Both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing: the deliberate displacement and killing of people because of their ethnicity. Moscow secretly supported Azerbaijan in the conflict. The war ended in a de facto victory for the Armenians, who were able to establish self-government over much of the territory they claimed, although not a single country, not even Armenia, officially recognized Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence. . Whether it was because the Armenians won, or because the conflict ended when Russia had been destabilized by its own bloody constitutional crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh was the only conflict region of the former empire where Russia did not station the his troops
Over the next three decades, the political paths of Armenia and Azerbaijan, two neighbors inextricably linked by blood and war, diverged. Azerbaijan moved from Soviet totalitarianism to post-Soviet dictatorship, with a ruling dynasty, censorship and widespread political repression. One of the world’s original oil powers, Azerbaijan also grew up relatively wealthy. He fostered diplomatic, economic and military ties with neighboring Turkey and with Israel, which sees Azerbaijan as an ally in any confrontation with Azerbaijan’s neighbor Iran. Armenia, at least formally, undertook a transition to democracy. That transition reached a dead end in October 1999, when a group of gunmen stormed parliament and killed nine people, including all the leaders of one of the two ruling parties. The surviving party leader, Robert Kocharyan, ruled the country for another decade, and his clan remained in power until 2018, when a peaceful revolution appeared to usher in a new era. The new leader of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, is a former journalist.
In both countries, Nagorno-Karabakh remained the focus of political life. For Azerbaijan, the pain and humiliation of the 1994 defeat formed the centerpiece of the national narrative. “Azerbaijan gained its independence parallel to the war, so Nagorno-Karabakh has played an important role in shaping Azerbaijani national identity,” Shujaat Ahmadzada, an independent Azerbaijani political scientist, told me. “There was the memory, the images of the internally displaced, adding to the narrative of having suffered injustices. And conflict is important for maintaining and consolidating power.”
In Armenia, what became known as the Karabakh Clan has held power for most of the post-Soviet period. Kocharyan is a former leader of the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armen Martirosyan, a longtime Armenian publisher and political activist, told me that, in 2018, he had hoped Nikol Pashinyan would finally represent a “party of peace.” But even Pashinyan, who was born in 1975, was forced to claim that he had his political beginnings in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Seven out of eight of our political parties are war parties,” Martirosyan said.
Both sides continued to arm. The self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic formed its own armed forces, aided and supplied by Armenia. Azerbaijan imported weapons from Israel. “It should come as no surprise to anyone that an oil-rich country with an authoritarian regime can muster a well-trained and cohesive army,” said Alexander Cherkasov, a Russian researcher in exile who has been documenting ethnic conflicts in the region for a long time. thirty-five years, he said. In 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh. The fight lasted forty-four days. Thousands of people died. Azerbaijan reestablished control over much of the self-proclaimed republic and adjacent territories. In the end, Moscow negotiated a ceasefire that was based on the presence of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. The status of the self-proclaimed republic remained undecided but, for now, it appeared that a reduced Nagorno-Karabakh would remain self-governing.
Less than fifteen months later, Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing political persecution, the draft and Western economic sanctions flooded into Armenia. Russia’s security guarantees to Armenia began to look less reliable, and the price of those guarantees seemed to increase. According to Arman Grigoryan, an Armenian-born political scientist at Lehigh University, Pashinyan launched a “grandiose project to remove Armenia from Russia’s orbit.” Apparently counting on Russia’s waning influence in the world and waning interest in the region, Pashinyan dragged his feet on signing a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, at least one that involved having Russia at the table. It also failed to fulfill one of the obligations Armenia had agreed to as part of the 2020 ceasefire agreement: to provide Azerbaijan with a land corridor to Nakhchivan, the country’s enclave on the other side of the border with Armenia, three hundred miles from Baku. Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, this corridor would be controlled by Russian security services. Pashinyan’s reluctance was understandable, but his hope that Western support would allow him to stall indefinitely proved unfounded. Pashinyan also took a series of diplomatic—or, rather, undiplomatic—steps that irked Russia. More recently, he asked the Armenian parliament to ratify the Rome Statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court, which has accused Vladimir Putin of alleged war crimes against Ukraine. (Russia, like the United States, has not ratified the Rome Statute.)
Late last year, Azerbaijan began increasing pressure on Nagorno-Karabakh. A blockade was imposed in December, appearing to cut off the only supply route to the enclave. People found some ways to avoid it, but over time the situation grew. Thomas de Waal, a London-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Europe Endowment for International Peace, who has been documenting the Karabakh conflict for nearly three decades, told me that “thousands of people were without gas and there was rationing of bread, up to two hundred grams a day. That and having to walk everywhere for miles, for anything. And then, out of nowhere, to be bombed.”
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