The Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh

Azerbaijan's invasion of the Armenian enclave is a byproduct of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The map of the Caucasus region looks like some gerrymandered mess drawn up to ensure a Republican safe district. Armenia, the oldest Christian nation in the world, is wedged between Turkey—the country that authored the Armenian genocide of 1915-16—and Azerbaijan, a Muslim and Turkic nation that has been its bitter enemy for generations. The semi-autonomous province of Nakhchivan, part of Azerbaijan, lays to the southwest, cut off completely from the rest of the country, like Alaska to the Lower 48. A tiny strip of land, the Lachin corridor, connects Armenia with Artsakh, its own semi-autonomous province, the remnants of the Soviet oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh that extends like a hangnail into Azerbaijan proper.

Ownership of that mountainous region—settled by Armenians many centuries ago—has been the cause of hostility for at least 100 years, dating back to the eye-blink of time when the two countries were briefly independent, between the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires and the rise of the USSR. The Soviets kept tensions in check, although even that autocratic regime could not fully control the people who lived there. Hostilities were renewed during the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which led to the outbreak of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1988. When a ceasefire was brokered in 1994, Armenia controlled Nagorno-Karabakh. Between the war and the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Azeris were displaced in the early 1990s.

Despite numerous attempts at mediation, there has been fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little—ever since. Two peoples with different religious faiths and different cultural traditions, sworn enemies, crammed into a not terribly big chunk of land they both lay claim to: it’s a diplomatic disaster zone. Think the Balkans in the Caucasus.

This geography was not built to last, and it didn’t. Artsakh, the Armenian quasi-state, doesn’t exist anymore. Last week, Azeri forces launched a blitzkrieg and took it. A proud sort-of nation that had declared its own independence, had its own government and capital and flag, issued its own currency, and endured for decades of war, fell in the course of a single news cycle. Here yesterday, gone today.

This did not happen in a vacuum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow has kept the peace in the Caucasus. In practice, that meant the Christian Russians protecting the Christian Armenians from attack. The Azeris wanted to invade Nagorno-Karabakh, territory they believed belonged to them, but they didn’t want to incur the wrath of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. This year, the status quo changed. The Russians did nothing when the Azeris closed the Lachin corridor this past January, blockading supply lines to the Armenian enclave. The result: shortages of food, baby formula, cigarettes, medicine. (Note: the international community also shrugged.)

Last week, during the sudden assault, the Russians again stood down. There was no one to check the Azeri advance. Over one hundred thousand of the 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh fled. (To picture the scale of that, imagine if New York and New Jersey were suddenly at war, and 400,000 native New Jerseyans left Brooklyn for Hoboken.) When a mission from the U.N. arrived in the capital at Stepanakert, the place was deserted. “The mission saw very few local population remaining in the city.  The team heard from interlocutors that between 50 and 1,000 ethnic Armenians remain in the Karabakh region,” the report read. “The mission was struck by the sudden manner in which the local population left their homes and the suffering the experience must have caused.”¹ Al-Jazeera showed eerie footage of the town square that was empty save for baby strollers, plastic chairs, and stray dogs.

In denying accusations of ethnic cleansing, Azerbaijan insists that it did not force anyone to leave, that the Armenians chose to flee. That may be technically accurate, but it misses the bigger picture, which is: the Armenians ran for their lives. And they had good reason to do so.

Azerbaijan is ruled by Ilham Aliyev, who has been “president” since 2003, when he succeeded [checks notes] his old man, Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB bigwig. In 2012, he was named “Person of the Year” by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), narrowly edging out Albanian drug lord Naser Kelmendi, Uzbekistan strongman Islam Karimov, and perennial corruption All-Star Vladimir Putin. I won’t go into the details now, but Aliyev is corrupt, and because of this, Azerbaijan is a shit place to live—especially for ethnic Armenians.

Also in 2012, Aliyev arranged for the Hungarian government to allow the convicted murderer Ramil Safarov to return to his native Azerbaijan. Safarov was in Central Europe taking a class in English, sponsored by NATO; he killed one of his classmates, an Armenian national, in cold blood, while he was sleeping. It was the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh that compelled him to commit the crime, to which he confessed. Safarov was serving a life sentence, which Aliyev promised he would complete in Azerbaijan.

But that’s not what happened. Upon his extradition, Safarov was pardoned, feted, promoted, provided with a swanky apartment, and given eight years of back pay. In other words, Aliyev rewarded the violent murderer for indiscriminately killing an Armenian. The message was clear: Azerbaijan wants its citizens slaughtering ethnic Armenians.

Aliyev has a long history of anti-Armenian messaging. “I have said this before and I want to say again that conditions will be created for those who want to live there under the flag of Azerbaijan,” Aliyev said back in January, at the same press conference when he insisted the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade was not a blockade. He did not mention that in 2020, when Azeri forces took some land in the disputed area, they beheaded two Armenians—older men who had refused to leave. “If the [Nagorno-Karabakh] separatist movement had not been started against us, they could live as people do in all the other parts of Azerbaijan now. The conditions they live in now are obvious. . . . Therefore, whoever does not want to become our citizen, the road is not closed, it is open. They can leave, they can go by themselves, no one will hinder them.”

Leave they did. Almost all of them.

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Aliyev has wanted to take Nagorno-Karabakh for years. He had to wait until this moment to launch the blitzkrieg. Until now, Russia would not allow it. Which begs the question: Why did Moscow stand down?

The reasons seem obvious. Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine has destroyed his standing in the free world. He needs friends wherever he can find them. Whatever their shared history, Yerevan was never going to side with him on the war; Baku is a different story. There’s nothing a strongman loves more than the company of a fellow strongman. Aliyev and Putin are natural allies. My guess is, Russia allowing this was some sort of payment, either for services rendered or services soon to be provided.

While the sudden humanitarian crisis in Armenia is unlikely to attract much attention in the newsrooms of America, ethnic violence in places other than Ukraine help keep Putin’s own atrocities out of the spotlight. Russia has brought death and destruction to Ukraine for a year and a half now, blowing up countless buildings, raping, looting, killing anyone in its path. What does Putin care if 100,000 Armenians have to leave Nagorno-Karabakh?

Then there are the inevitable Trump connections. Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of the Azeri strongman—and herself no stranger to corruption—was married for years to the pop star Emin Agalarov. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the guy who helped arrange the Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016, attended by Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskya, Agalarov’s publicist Rob Gladstone, and Agalarov associate Ike Kaveladze. Oh, and Donald Trump made a cameo appearance in one of Emin’s music videos. (Emin, incidentally, lived for many years in New Jersey).

Emin is the son of the billionaire real estate developer Aras Agalarov, who is from Azerbaijan and closely tied to Aliyev. Aras hosted the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, held at one of his properties in Moscow, and paid its owner, Donald Trump, $20 million for the privilege. (The pageant happened in November, the same month Agalarov received the Russian Order of Honor from Putin). It was on that trip that Trump did the music video.

Oh, and I almost forgot: the Trump family helped build a hotel in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, that sure seems like it was financed with money from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Ivanka Trump was prominently involved. The whole operation is fishy af. Adam Davidson wrote a feature about it for the New Yorker back in 2017 that should have spurred federal investigation but was instead met with yawns by the rest of the media and the government.

The point is this: Trump, Putin, and Aliyev are all connected. Corrupt monsters, all three of them. Trump attempted a violent coup in Washington. Putin invaded Ukraine. Aliyev just seized Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia is stuck with Putin. Azerbaijan is stuck with Aliyev. Not so America and Trump. In 13 months, the United States is free to renounce FPOTUS once and for all. Will we?

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Photo credit: David Stanley. Border flags. The flags of Armenia (left) and Nagorno Karabakh (right) fly together at the highway border crossing between the two countries, 2017.

1. The UN mission found no examples of violence or looting, but there were, unfortunately, plenty of such examples.