A ceasefire has been agreed in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a day after Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against ethnic Armenian forces. <\/p>\n
Whether this leads to a lasting peace is not yet clear. Armenia and Azerbaijan have already fought two wars over Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the Soviet Union. <\/p>\n
The flare-up \u2013 which killed dozens of people \u2013 alarmed the international community and <\/strong>raised questions over Russia\u2019s ability to maintain its long-term role <\/strong>as power broker in the region. <\/p>\n Nagorno-Karabakh, known as Artsakh to Armenians, is a landlocked region in the Caucasus Mountains and lies within Azerbaijan\u2019s borders. It is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is home to around 120,000 ethnic Armenians, who make up the majority of its population and reject Azerbaijani rule. <\/p>\n The region has its own de facto government which is backed by Armenia, but it is not officially recognized by Armenia or any other country. <\/p>\n Under the Soviet Union, of which Azerbaijan and Armenia are both former members, Nagorno-Karabakh became an autonomous region within the <\/strong>republic of Azerbaijan in 1923. <\/p>\n Karabakh officials passed a resolution in 1988 declaring its intention to join the republic of Armenia, causing fighting to break out as the Soviet Union began to crumble, in what became the First Karabakh War. About 30,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced when the Armenian side gained control of the region and seven surrounding districts in Azerbaijan. <\/p>\n After years of sporadic clashes between the two sides, the Second Karabakh War began in 2020. Azerbaijan, backed by its historic ally Turkey, won a crushing victory in just 44 days, reclaiming the seven districts and about a third of Nagorno-Karabakh. <\/p>\n The war ended after Russia, a longtime ally of Armenia but with growing ties to Azerbaijan, negotiated a ceasefire. The Moscow-brokered deal provided for about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to deploy to the region to prevent further Azerbaijani encroachments and guard the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting the enclave to Armenia. <\/p>\n Despite Russia\u2019s peacekeeping presence, Nagorno-Karabakh has been under blockade for nine months. In December 2022, Azerbaijan-backed activists established a military checkpoint along the Lachin corridor, preventing the import of food and prompting fears that residents were being left to starve. <\/p>\n In the days leading up to the strikes on Stepanakert, the Karabakh foreign ministry <\/strong>warned that \u201cthe Azerbaijani side has been carrying out daily troop transfers and stockpiling of various weapons\u2026 preparing the ground for large-scale aggression.\u201d <\/p>\n Despite the tensions, Tuesday\u2019s escalation was sudden. Justifying its strikes on Stepanakert, Azerbaijan\u2019s defense ministry said an Azerbaijani vehicle had struck a mine that had been planted in previously de-mined areas, killing two civilians. <\/p>\n Azerbaijan also said its army had come under \u201csystematic shelling\u201d from Armenia\u2019s armed forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. <\/p>\n But Armenia\u2019s foreign ministry rejected claims that its armed forces were in Nagorno-Karabakh, which instead is protected by the Artsakh Defense Army. \u201cArmenia\u2019s assistance to Nagorno-Karabakh is of a humanitarian nature\u201d due to the ongoing blockade, it said in a statement. <\/p>\n By the time Karabakh officials agreed to the ceasefire, at least 32 people were reported to have been killed and 200 others wounded. The Nagorno-Karabakh presidency said its forces were outnumbered by Azerbaijani forces \u201cseveral times over.\u201d <\/p>\n The ceasefire came into effect at 1 p.m. local time Wednesday, after the Karabakh presidential office agreed to \u201cthe dissolution and complete disarmament of the armed formations.\u201d <\/p>\n Armenia no longer disputes that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan\u2019s territory. <\/p>\n After the 2020 war exposed Armenia\u2019s military inferiority, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan conceded in April this year that his government is willing to relinquish its claims on the region. He argued \u201cpeace is possible\u201d only if Armenia limits its territorial ambitions to the borders of the former Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic \u2013 that is, excluding Nagorno-Karabakh. <\/p>\n Now, Azerbaijan\u2019s longtime President Ilham Aliyev is seeking to press home what he sees as his advantage. His rhetoric has grown increasingly aggressive in recent months. In a speech delivered in May, Aliyev said of Karabakh Armenians: \u201cEither they will bend their necks and come themselves, or things will develop differently\u201d \u2013 a veiled threat of military action. <\/p>\n Azerbaijan\u2019s position on Tuesday was uncompromising, as it called for \u201cthe unconditional and complete withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces\u201d and \u201cthe dissolution of the puppet regime\u201d in Nagorno-Karabakh. <\/p>\n Under the terms of Wednesday\u2019s ceasefire, Nagorno-Karabakh has dissolved its army, while Armenia has continued to insist that it did not have a military presence of its own in the region. How far Azerbaijan is willing to go in insisting on the dissolution of the de facto government is not yet clear. <\/p>\n Russia is a historic ally of Armenia\u2019s, while Turkey has long provided support to Azerbaijan. <\/p>\n Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey supports \u201cthe steps taken by Azerbaijan, where we act with the motto of one nation, two states, to protect its territorial integrity,\u201d during his speech at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. <\/p>\n Turkey has itself launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Armenians, in a genocide of the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. <\/p>\n Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed \u201cconcern about the sharp escalation of tensions and the outbreak of hostilities.\u201d <\/p>\n However, the latest violence came during what some analysts have argued may constitute a fracture in the close relationship between Armenia and Russia. <\/p>\n Armenia has for decades trusted Russia as the sole guarantor of its security, which Moscow purports to provide through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a military alliance of post-Soviet states that includes Armenia but not Azerbaijan. <\/p>\n But Armenia has grown frustrated by Russia\u2019s unwillingness or inability to defend it against Azerbaijani aggression, as ties between Moscow and Baku have grown. <\/p>\n This month, Armenia sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine for the first time. It then hosted joint military training exercises with the US. Its parliament is also set to ratify the ICC\u2019s Rome Statute \u2013 meaning it would be obliged to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he were to set foot in the country. <\/p>\n Pashinyan criticized Russia on Tuesday for not alerting his government about Azerbaijan\u2019s plans to launch military action: \u201cWe haven\u2019t received any information from our partners in Russia about that operation,\u201d he was quoted by Armenpress as saying. <\/p>\n The news of fresh strikes on Nagorno-Karabakh sparked cryptic reactions from prominent Russian figures showing little sympathy for Armenia. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state-owned Russia Today, said the news was \u201ctragic, hopeless and predictable,\u201d adding \u201cthe fate of Judas is unenviable.\u201d <\/p>\n\n A ceasefire has been agreed in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a day after Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against ethnic Armenian forces. Whether this leads to a lasting peace is not yet clear. Armenia and Azerbaijan have already fought two wars over Nagorno-Karabakh since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The flare-up \u2013 which <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} What is Nagorno-Karabakh?<\/h2>\n
Why are tensions flaring again?<\/h2>\n
What are Azerbaijan and Armenia\u2019s positions?<\/h2>\n
How are Russia and Turkey involved?<\/h2>\n