For over a century, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh resisted every diplomatic solution anyone attempted. In September 2023, Azerbaijan solved it by force in 24 hours. Over 100,000 Armenians fled. Here's the full story.
For over a century, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh resisted every diplomatic solution anyone attempted. In September 2023, Azerbaijan solved it by force in 24 hours. Over 100,000 Armenians fled. Here’s the full story.
When this article was first published in 2021, the question it asked was: could the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict be solved? The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh had been running for over a century, had produced three wars, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and resisted every diplomatic solution anyone had attempted. The answer to “could it be solved?” seemed, at best, uncertain.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan solved it. In 24 hours.
A lightning military offensive, launched on September 19, 2023, overwhelmed the Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh in less than a day. The self-declared Republic of Artsakh, which Armenians had maintained for three decades, ceased to exist. Within weeks, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians — virtually the entire Armenian population of the enclave — fled to Armenia in one of the largest and fastest mass displacements in modern European history. The territory that two countries had fought three wars over was now, for the first time in over a century, under undisputed Azerbaijani control.
The conflict was solved. The question now is what kind of solution it was — and what it means for the region, for the broader rules-based international order, and for the Armenians who lost a homeland that their ancestors had inhabited for millennia.
“In 24 hours in September 2023, Azerbaijan ended a conflict that had lasted over a century. The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh packed what they could carry and left.”
The Roots of the Conflict
The heart of the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute was always Nagorno-Karabakh — a mountainous enclave that Armenians called Artsakh, with an Armenian-majority population, located entirely within the internationally recognised borders of Azerbaijan. The contradiction between ethnic reality and political geography was set in place by Joseph Stalin in 1921, when the Soviet leadership assigned the Armenian-populated region to Soviet Azerbaijan rather than Soviet Armenia. The decision was likely calculated to sow manageable division between the two Soviet republics — a form of imperial management that would pay bitter dividends seventy years later.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the contradictions Stalin had embedded exploded. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh voted for independence. Azerbaijan rejected it. The result was a war from 1988 to 1994 that killed tens of thousands of people, displaced over a million, and ended with Armenian forces controlling Nagorno-Karabakh and a buffer zone of surrounding Azerbaijani territory. A ceasefire held for over two decades, but no peace treaty was signed and the status of the region was never resolved.
The religious dimension — Armenians are Christian, Azerbaijanis are predominantly Muslim — is real but frequently overstated. The conflict is primarily territorial and ethnic, not religious. What made it intractable was not faith but the impossibility of satisfying two legitimate but incompatible claims: Azerbaijan’s internationally recognised right to its territorial boundaries, and the Armenian population’s right to self-determination on land they had inhabited for centuries.
The 2020 War — Azerbaijan’s First Victory
In September 2020, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale offensive that changed the military balance of the conflict decisively. The six-week war, using Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB2 drones that Armenia had no effective countermeasures against, recaptured significant territory that Armenian forces had held since 1994. On November 9, a Russian-brokered ceasefire ended the fighting. Armenia was forced to concede most of the surrounding buffer districts. The Armenians of those areas — tens of thousands of people — fled or were displaced.
The Armenians retained Stepanakert, the capital of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, and a reduced area around it. Russian peacekeeping forces were deployed to maintain the ceasefire. The conflict was paused, not resolved. And Azerbaijan had demonstrated something important: that with the right weapons and the right moment, the military balance that had preserved the Armenian position for 26 years could be overturned.
“The 2020 war changed everything. The 2023 offensive finished it. The drones that won the first battle made the second battle inevitable.”
September 2023 — The End
On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched what it called an “anti-terrorist operation” in Nagorno-Karabakh. By September 20, the Armenian forces had surrendered. The Republic of Artsakh, which had existed in various forms since 1991, dissolved itself on January 1, 2024.
The speed of the collapse shocked observers even though, in retrospect, it should not have. Azerbaijan had been blockading the Lachin Corridor — the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia — since December 2022, cutting the Armenian population off from food, medicine, and resupply. By September 2023, the population was weakened, the defences were depleted, and Russian peacekeepers — whose presence was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of offensive — did nothing to intervene.
Russia’s inaction was decisive. In the years since the 2020 ceasefire, Russia had been distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, its international isolation, and the enormous costs of its own war. It had neither the capacity nor, apparently, the political will to honour its implicit commitment to Armenian security in Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia, which had long depended on Russia as its security guarantor, found itself abandoned at the moment it needed protection most.
The Flight
Within days of the ceasefire, the exodus began. Over 100,000 people — essentially the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh — left for Armenia. The images were extraordinary: a continuous column of cars on the road to the Lachin Corridor, people carrying what they could, leaving behind homes that had been Armenian for generations. In some areas, as in 2020, people reportedly burned their houses rather than leave them intact for Azerbaijani occupation.
The International Criminal Court and various human rights organisations launched investigations. The US State Department issued statements of concern. The European Union expressed alarm. None of it changed anything on the ground. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh were gone, and the international community — consumed by Ukraine, the Middle East, and its own internal politics — lacked the will to do anything meaningful about it.
What Happened to Armenia?
The defeat of 2020 and the catastrophe of 2023 have had profound political consequences inside Armenia. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018 on a wave of democratic optimism, has faced intense criticism over his handling of the conflict. The loss of Nagorno-Karabakh has been the defining trauma of Armenian political life in the 2020s.
Remarkably, however, the Pashinyan government has used the defeat to pivot Armenia’s foreign policy in a direction that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Armenia has been distancing itself from Russia — suspending its participation in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation, signing a defence cooperation agreement with the United States, and actively engaging with the European Union. The country that spent thirty years depending on Russia for its security is now exploring alternatives.
A peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan remains elusive but not impossible. Negotiations have been ongoing. The fundamental territorial dispute no longer exists — Azerbaijan has what it wanted. What remains to be agreed is the normalisation of relations, the opening of transport corridors, and the question of the rights of the Armenian population that remains in Azerbaijan (a small number who did not flee or who have since returned).
What Does It Mean?
The resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by military force raises uncomfortable questions that go beyond the Caucasus.
The international community spent thirty years trying to negotiate a solution that would balance Azerbaijani territorial integrity with Armenian self-determination. Every negotiated framework failed. In 2023, Azerbaijan imposed a solution unilaterally in 24 hours — a solution that involved the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 people from their homes. The international response was muted enough to constitute, in practice, acceptance.
The lesson that other governments will draw from this is not a comfortable one. If a country can resolve a territorial dispute by force, suffer minimal international consequences, and retain the territory — what does that say about the value of negotiation? What does it say about international law? And what does it say about the protection available to small ethnic minorities in disputed territories around the world?
The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is resolved, in the sense that the fighting has stopped and the territory is no longer disputed. Whether what happened was a resolution or an erasure — of a people, a culture, and a three-thousand-year-old presence on a piece of mountainous land — is a question that history will continue to argue about long after the international community has moved on.
Sources include the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and contemporaneous reporting from Reuters, the BBC, and the Guardian. The Republic of Artsakh formally dissolved on January 1, 2024.