For Azerbaijan, it’s all in the service of a cause that is seen as just. Baku’s initial grievance against Armenians was the Karabakh region’s desire to be united with Armenia. But that has since been eclipsed by anger over the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris from their homes in both Karabakh and the surrounding districts as they came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces during the first war. Since then, it has remained a central tenet of Azerbaijani state propaganda that one day they would return to their homes, no matter the cost.
Armenians who were in cities that remained under Azerbaijani control had to flee, too. In all, some 200,000 ran, compared to some 750,000 Azerbaijanis left homeless by the first war. But it’s not just a question of scale. Armenians won the first war and therefore never had to experience the bitterness of capitulation.
It’s a bitterness that has only grown over the years, and one that Azerbaijan has never tried to hide. Every year on Armed Forces Day, a lengthy parade of state-of-the-art weaponry rolls through Baku’s Freedom Square, overseen by Azerbaijan’s unchanging President Ilham Aliyev. In 2018, armored jeeps displayed the tiny Israeli Orbiter “Kamikaze” drone, being used today to deadly effect on the battlefield. In another column, the army paraded the Russian Solntsepyok multiple rocket launcher system, which incinerates everything in an area equivalent to eight soccer fields with 24 rockets fired simultaneously. Yet somehow, Yerevan didn’t truly believe these weapons would ever be used.
“Instead of buying the most modern weapons and preparing for the worst, the politicians were building villas for themselves,” a Russian teacher in Stepanakert said of the de facto authorities in Karabakh and their political allies in mainland Armenia who were recently overthrown in a 2018 revolt against corruption. They grew complacent because they thought Russia would always defend Armenia. “They didn’t even refurbish the bomb shelters,” she complained.
The winner of that revolution, Armenia’s newly minted Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, enraged Azerbaijan further by visiting Nagorno-Karabakh in 2019 and calling openly for “reunification” with Armenia, taking things a step further than his predecessor, who had called only for its independence to be recognized to avoid unnecessarily provoking Baku.
Meanwhile, Russia has taken a hands-off approach to the conflict, mediating between the two sides as a neutral arbiter instead of involving its military on Armenia’s behalf. Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out in an interview recently that his country’s mutual defense treaty with Armenia does not extend to Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan’s territory. If the war were to spread to Armenia proper, that would of course be another matter.
Russia, the only power with real influence in both countries, has tried to float a resolution long discussed under the auspices of the so-called Minsk Group process: Armenians give up five of the seven Azerbaijani regions they captured in the first war and keep the two connecting Karabakh to mainland Armenia. But Azerbaijan has never been willing to recognize Karabakh’s independence in exchange for the land, and Armenians have never been willing to relinquish the territory without Baku’s promise to recognize their Karabakh statelet.
In every previous round of negotiations, this impasse seemed to more or less satisfy the Armenians. After all, every time a deal wasn’t reached, the status quo remained in place – a status quo in which Armenians held all the territory in question. Negotiations supported by Russia, the United States, and France never led anywhere for decades because mediators were unable to untangle this conundrum.
And so a situation that was unacceptable to Azerbaijan stood. “The [peace] process certainly prefers a status quo that doesn’t include significant loss of life occurring,” U.S. Ambassador Carey Cavanaugh, who served as a Minsk Group co-chair until 2001, told me by way of explanation. “I don’t think you can fault international mediators, negotiators or diplomats, for that.”
But now, significant loss of life is exactly what is occurring, after Azerbaijan – encouraged by Turkey – launched a surprise attack on Sept. 27. On Thursday, Putin said the conflict had already claimed a total of around 5,000 souls, offering figures that were much higher than the warring parties themselves have been willing to publish. While Azerbaijan isn’t releasing its military losses at all, Armenia has officially reported 927 deaths among its forces. Civilian fatalities have been caused mostly by the senseless shelling of population centers by both sides and have reached the 100 mark.