The fall of Nagorno Karabakh
Nagorno-Karabakh, known locally as Artsakh, was a mountainous region in the South Caucasus with a predominantly ethnic Armenian population. The region had declared independence in 1991 during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leading to the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which established Armenian control. Governed as the Republic of Artsakh, it remained internationally unrecognized and was officially part of Azerbaijan according to global law.
In 2023, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade on the sole land route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, under the pretext of environmental concerns. This blockade caused severe humanitarian crises, with shortages of food, medicine, and essential supplies for the region’s ethnic Armenian population. The isolation ultimately pressured Nagorno-Karabakh's leadership to dissolve the region's government following Azerbaijan's subsequent military offensive.
Following the offensive launched in September 2023, almost all the inhabitants of the former de facto Republic of Artsakh fled to Armenia. Many were only able to carry with them documents, and a handful of soil or a pebble from their native land to remind them forever where they came from. For many refugees, reintegration into the Armenian social fabric has not been easy, amid a housing crisis exacerbated by the large number of Russian expatriates who moved to Yerevan after the start of the war in Ukraine. But for most people, the end of the Autonomous Republic became the collective trauma of the entire nation, which sees Nagorno-Karabakh as a key territory for Armenian identity.
'If we lose Artsakh, we turn the last page of Armenian history,' used to say Monte Melkonian, a second-generation Armenian and icon partisan of the first Nagorno Karabakh war.
