A lightning military offensive by Azerbaijan last week forced the government of Nagorno-Karabakh to capitulate and agree to dismantle its armed forces. The advance of Azerbaijani forces also set off an exodus of the mountainous region’s ethnic Armenian residents who say they fear genocide and, in any case, are unwilling to live under Azerbaijani rule.
More than 66,000 people — over half the region’s residents — have crossed the border to Armenia, and some officials say they believe the entire population will leave.
Prominent members of the Nagorno-Karabakh government have also been arrested or have surrendered to the Azerbaijani government.
David Babayan, the longtime spokesman for the breakaway government who also briefly served as its foreign minister, said he planned to hand himself over to authorities in Shusha, a city now controlled by Azerbaijan.
“You all know that I am included in the black list of Azerbaijan, and that the Azerbaijani side demanded my arrival in Baku for an appropriate investigation,” Babayan wrote on Facebook. “This decision, of course, will cause great pain and stress to my loved ones, but I am sure they will understand. My failure to appear or worse, my escape, will cause serious harm to our long suffering people.”
Azerbaijani border guards said Wednesday they had detained Ruben Vardanyan, the former state minister of Artsakh, and on Thursday, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service announced he had been arrested on charges of financing state terrorism.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been fiercely contested by the two former Soviet republics since a war in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the region’s majority Armenian population sought to break from the newly independent nation of Azerbaijan.
That first Nagorno-Karabakh war ended with a decisive Armenian victory. Massacres were committed by both sides, but ultimately the vast majority of Azerbaijanis — hundreds of thousands — were forced to leave the territory.
In a brief war in 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured most of Nagorno-Karabakh, ending decades of Armenian control of the region.
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