Again, there is open hostility in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani defense ministry declared the start of a new military campaign on Tuesday, bombarding nearby communities and the nation’s capital Stepanakert without discrimination.
Aerial photos and videos taken in recent weeks have revealed that Azerbaijan has been building up its military force around Armenia’s and Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders. As a copycat of the Russian military’s insignia in Ukraine, the upside-down letter “A” on Azerbaijani military vehicles appears to be a threat to cut through Southern Armenia and secure the land corridor into Nakhchivan and to Turkey, as President Ilham Aliyev has demanded since the end of the 2020 war.
Nagorno-Karabakh Is Experiencing War Once Again Because the World Did Nothing to Stop It
The terrible humanitarian situation in this breakaway territory of the South Caucasus has been denounced by numerous international organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and foreign governments. Malnutrition and medication shortages are killing locals.
According to the 1948 Genocide Convention of the UN, the continued blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh and its 120,000 residents since December 2022, as well as frequent ceasefire violations by Azerbaijan, led the previous Prosecutor General of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, to label this as genocide.
A closer examination of the reality on the ground reveals that neither peace nor averting another war are options.
Azerbaijan started and won an unprovoked war in the fall of 2020 with support from Turkey, Pakistan, and Israel, regaining roughly 10,000 square kilometers of Armenian-controlled territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Since November 2020, local self-defense forces and Russian peacekeepers without a wide international mandate or established rules of engagement have been patrolling the remaining 2,200 square kilometers.
Regular clashes along the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as on the Line of Contact in Nagorno-Karabakh have become the new standard. The Armenian government has announced that Azerbaijan had occupied around 150 square kilometers of its internationally recognized sovereign territory since May 2021.
Since October 2022, neither Russian nor unarmed European observers have been able to stop Azerbaijani incursions. The Azerbaijani government and different state-sponsored activists have started to talk more frequently since November 2020 about the state of Armenia standing in for “Western Azerbaijan.” It has long been an unofficial goal of Baku to repatriate Azerbaijani residents in Armenia and to dispute the nation’s right to exist. Armenia has now been cautioned not to criticize Azerbaijan’s racist remarks, which it uses for internal propaganda, in order to protect the prospects of a peace agreement. In the meantime, Aliyev has taken large areas of the Armenian highlands on the border and puts the population of the lowlands under fire—often literally—encouraged by this passivity of outside actors.
Following the election of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Armenia’s emergency parliamentary elections in 2021, the Armenian government began promoting a new narrative about a “peace deal” with Azerbaijan. Pashinyan has even openly proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh to be a part of Azerbaijan in order to satisfy one of Baku’s main demands.
The opportunity to try to bring about peace in the region was given to Russia, the EU, and the US by this backtracking. Most likely acting under coercion brought on by Azerbaijan’s threat of use of force, the Armenian leadership.
