War in the Caucasus: More than 2020 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded during a military operation conducted by Azerbaijan in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian officials in the region said on Wednesday.
The Russian peacekeeping force in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was sent to the region after the ceasefire agreement was signed in 2, said in a statement that its operatives had rescued 000,<> civilians from areas bombed by the Azeri army.
The Azeri army's shelling of the city of Stepanekrat in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh
"This is a big war, Azerbaijan has begun a full military operation. Basically, this is a classic act of ethnic cleansing," Ruben Vardanyan, the former head of the Armenian autonomy in Nagorno-Karabakh, told Reuters.
Azerbaijan announced yesterday the launch of a "special military operation" to "fight terrorism." Baku insisted that the operation would include operations against military targets only, but clarified that the goal of the operation was to dismantle Armenian autonomy in the region.
Why did the conflagration happen now?
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been negotiating for months an arrangement under the auspices of the European Union and the United States. As part of the negotiations, Yerevan recognized the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, but the question of the fate of the Armenians in the region has not been resolved Ostensibly, they are supposed to become citizens of Azerbaijan, but given the rivers of blood and the very deep mistrust between the sides, your country was reluctant, to say the least, to accept the arrangement in particular and trust Baku in general.
So what happened now? It seems that Baku decided to accelerate the application of sovereignty over the region that Armenia already recognized as belonging and to bring forces into the territory. The immediate trigger might have been a change of government in the region itself. Arkady Dubnov, an expert on the Caucasus region and Central Asia, writes on his Facebook page that former President Araik Arutyunyan stepped down and was replaced by security apparatus member Samwell Shahmnanyan, who immediately began pressing on the issue of Karabakh's status. Dubnov believes that this infuriated Baku, which had already reached understandings with Yerevan on the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and Armenia. From this recognition it was implied that aggressive action by Azerbaijan was only a matter of time, because the recognition pulled the rug out from under the legitimacy of the Stepanakert government and its army. According to Dubnov, Pishenyan chose not to enter the war, in which Armenia would certainly have been defeated.
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