Negotiating with the “iron fist”

Displaced: the journalist Marut Wanjan, in the background Nagorno-Karabakh controlled by Azerbaijan

Foreigners are prohibited from using the road from the village of Schurnuch towards the south. It winds through the border area in southeastern Armenia, with young military servicemen in Armenian uniforms standing at regular intervals on the side of the road with machine guns. Azerbaijani positions can be seen on the hills. Only at the last checkpoint does a barrier block the road and two soldiers ask for the passports. They kindly ask them to turn back. Back in Schurnuch, some residents want to show where the border divides their village: "Right behind the apple tree, Azerbaijan begins, right here." One of the villagers shows the spot, while his friends engage the young Armenian soldiers, who are looking over skeptically from a checkpoint in the village, in a conversation to distract them. Since the war in 2020, the border runs directly through the village, at this house even through the meadow and the cow shed.

The middle-aged men wear gold chains with crosses on their hairy chests and are in high spirits. They have just come from a party and there is a half-empty plastic bottle of home-made liquor rolling around in their Jeraz minivan. If you stand on the street and shout insults, the Azerbaijani soldiers will come over, they say with a laugh.

»Aliyev does talk about the “great return” of the Azerbaijanis to Nagorno-Karabakh, but that is nonsense. It's hard to get people to relocate.« Marut Wanjan, journalist

It is insisted on inviting guests home, where the host's wife serves coffee, chocolate and fresh figs. This is where the conversation becomes more serious. Schurnuch became more isolated and poorer as a result of the war. Some families have left and houses are empty.

Until 2020, the border only existed on paper. Behind the village began the territory of the internationally unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, called Artsakh in Armenia - an illegal separatist construct from Azerbaijan's perspective. The first Nagorno-Karabakh war ended in 1995 with the region's de facto independence. Armenian troops and militias not only controlled the territory of the autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast, which was part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic until 1991 and was historically dominated by an Armenian population, but also conquered parts of Azerbaijani territory beyond it. Hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis fled, as did hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Azerbaijan and the war zone.

For years, the Armenian side stuck to the status quo. Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, who took power in 2003 after the death of his father Heidar, used his country's natural resource wealth to rearm and threatened to conquer the territory. In 2020, the Azerbaijani army attacked, supported by thousands of Islamist mercenaries flown in from Syria in Turkish military planes.

After 44 days, over 4,000 Armenian soldiers were dead, most of them young conscripts or volunteers. Around 3,000 soldiers died on the Azerbaijani side. Azerbaijan had brutally demonstrated its military superiority and occupied large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh. From now on, Russian peacekeepers should monitor the only remaining access from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh via the so-called Lachin corridor.

Three years later, Azerbaijan struck the final blow: the offensive on the core area of Nagorno-Karabakh began on September 19th. The fighting, with hundreds of deaths, lasted only two days. Aliyev said in a televised speech that his "iron fist" had defeated the separatist Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh. The entire remaining Armenian population – a good 100,000 people – fled to the west. They viewed Aliyev's assurances that their rights would be respected as mere lip service. Azerbaijan, ruled by the second-generation kleptocratic Aliyev family, is a dictatorship; It ranks 146th out of 167 countries in the Economist's 2019 Democracy Index. Videos emerged of Azerbaijani soldiers shooting or beheading captured soldiers and civilians.

»No one stood up back then and said: This is our last day. But everyone was packing,” says journalist Marut Wanjan (in English transcription: Vanyan), describing the fearful atmosphere in those days. »I myself posted on Facebook that I can no longer endure this hell. I had been to the military cemetery. It was horrible. Excavators dug pits and women cried. They had no tears left, they sounded like animals."

Vanyan has lived almost his entire life in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Even though the region "resembled a large military base" and despite the corruption of those in power, people could live well there, he says.

In 2023, the attack was preceded by a nine-month hunger blockade, food and medicine became scarce and there was no electricity. Wanjan sat in the basement while the artillery shells fell all around him. "You're like an animal, you hold on to the walls and don't know what to do." In the days that followed, thousands of cars blocked the way through the Lachin corridor to the city of Goris in mile-long traffic jams. Vanjan now lives there, while most Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians fled further inland or out of the country.

In the months after the escape, he often lay awake at night and thought about the streets of his hometown, says Wanjan. Nowadays he can only see them in Azerbaijani media reports or propaganda videos. Stepanakert is now largely a ghost town. »Aliyev does talk about the “great return” of the Azerbaijanis to Nagorno-Karabakh, but that is nonsense. It's hard to get people to move once they've settled somewhere," says Wanjan. The Armenians who fled the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s also rarely returned.

Since the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-Azerbaijani border has been over 900 kilometers long. The Azerbaijani army continues to occupy over 200 square kilometers of Armenian territory, especially in the Jermuk region.

After the Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh, there were further Azerbaijani attacks on Armenia. After 2023, Azerbaijan primarily threatened the mountainous south of Armenia, in the Syunik region. Armenia is surrounded on two sides by Azerbaijani territory: in the west is the Nakhichevan exclave, in the east, in places barely more than 40 kilometers away, is the Azerbaijani core area. The borders on both sides are so close that Azerbaijani stations can be received on the car radio. Aliyev called for the establishment of a "Zangesur corridor" through southern Armenia to connect the two regions.

As early as 2021, he had called Azerbaijan's border regions "Eastern Zangesur" and spoke of the fact that Azerbaijanis would "return" to "Western Zangesur" - i.e. to southern Armenia; According to Aliyev, this is the “ancestral land” of Azerbaijan. Until 2020, the Aliyev dictatorship had always upheld the international legal principle of territorial integrity, which had been violated by Armenia's Nagorno-Karabakh, but now it used aggressive irredentist rhetoric. Many feared that the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh would be followed by an attack on southern Armenia. Although the two countries are conducting peace negotiations, Armenian villages near the border have repeatedly been shot at.

Under the proud gaze of US President Donald Trump, Pashinyan and Aliyev shook hands and declared their intention to continue negotiating peace.

That only changed with the meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Aliyev in Washington, D.C., in August 2025. Under the proud gaze of US President Donald Trump, the two shook hands and declared their intention to continue negotiating peace. In the future, the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” will connect Azerbaijan and its exclave, a kind of logistics corridor that will be operated by US companies.

Since then, Trump has listed the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as one of the world wars that he successfully ended. However, many in Armenia have their doubts. Wanjan is also skeptical. »But since the meeting in Washington, things have been quieter at the border. There are no more shootings, there are fewer military threats," he says. »Bunkers are being built everywhere for this. What are they for if there is to be peace?”

One of the villages that was shot at last year is Chnazach. The way there leads past Goris towards the border. Road signs still show the way to Stepanakert. The road was once the main route to Nagorno-Karabakh, but today it is almost deserted except for a few tractors and Armenian military trucks thundering past. There are military positions on the summits, and young military servicemen with machine guns stand guard next to concrete bunkers.

David Babajan still remembers those nights in the spring of 2025 clearly: tracer ammunition whistled over the houses at night, and some were hit. The Kalashnikovs would have sounded the worst. "I wasn't afraid myself, but what about the children?" The over 50-year-old sits tired in his kitchen and smokes thin cigarettes. He worked in forestry all day. His little daughter leans on his chair and plays on his cell phone. A few hundred meters away, right at the end of the village, are the first Azerbaijani positions. He says they wanted to intimidate the villagers and put pressure on the Armenian side. Some families then moved away.

He doesn't want to leave, says Babajan. Before 2023, he lived in the south of Nagorno-Karabakh and built a house here in Khnazakh for the third time in his life.

It is quiet in Chnazach this evening. Between the houses on the mountainside there are rock caves that served as shelters during the war. A man drives cows through the unpaved streets. Young people are hanging around in front of the only shop.

He doesn't want to leave, says Babajan. Before 2023, he lived in the south of Nagorno-Karabakh and built a house here in Khnazakh for the third time in his life. His daughter grew up here, so they are staying here. Even if he believes that the war will come back at some point. But then it will affect the entire country anyway.

Babajan did not have to fight in the 2020 war because he has six children. »But I brought volunteers to the front in my own car. And bodies back. I stacked the dead like bananas in the trunk," he remembers. His lanky son stands nearby and listens attentively. Soon he will be drafted into military service, like his older brother before him.

He also brought food to soldiers who were sitting in the positions at the front, Babajan continues. The war was chaotic, the soldiers were often poorly equipped and barely prepared. Volunteers often traveled to the war zone in clean uniforms and just wanted to leave the next morning. Others only came to have their photo taken with a shiny Kalashnikov. It was mainly young conscripts who fought in the Armenian army - one reason why the so-called 44-Day War was so traumatic for Armenian society.

Armenia celebrates its Independence Day on September 21st. On Republic Square in the capital Yerevan, pop stars are singing and flags are everywhere. The government did not mark the third anniversary of the “ethnic cleansing of Artsakh,” as it is often called here, this week. Prime Minister Pashinyan invokes the prospect of a “new Armenia” without the burden of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In contrast to this optimistic view are his warnings of a new war if his negotiating policy with Azerbaijan is not continued. Before the parliamentary elections in June, he said that war could come as early as September if Civil Contract, his party, did not get a majority.

One of Azerbaijan's conditions for a peace treaty is a change to the Armenian constitution. This contains a reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which mentions Nagorno-Karabakh - according to Azerbaijan, Armenia is thereby claiming its territory. Pashinyan's party received an absolute majority of seats in the election, but not the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. But that is not the only reason why the signing of a peace treaty is a long way off.

Azerbaijan's nationalist rhetoric, which sometimes seems like an open threat of war, is one of the biggest obstacles in the peace process. As part of this, state-financed contacts take place at the “civil society level”, organized on the Armenian side by the Peace Bridge Initiative. Critics see this as a mockery because there is no independent civil society in the Azerbaijani dictatorship and opponents of the war course are persecuted and imprisoned.

At the end of September it became known that the Azerbaijani side was suspending the meetings for the time being. The reason is a scandal over an official tour of conquered Nagorno-Karabakh with 150 foreign diplomats and representatives of international organizations. Senior Azerbaijani government officials there, in front of cameras, described Armenian churches and monasteries as "Caucasian Albanian," referring to a kingdom that existed until the eighth century. With such falsifications of history, the Azerbaijani government has been denying Armenian history in the region for decades. This is often accompanied by the destruction of centuries-old Armenian churches and other historical sites, for example systematically from the late 1990s in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan and in some cases also in the conquered Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Peace Bridge then noted in a press release that such statements were detrimental to efforts to build “new relationships.” That was reason enough for the Azerbaijani side to initially break off contact.

»They know exactly what kind of reaction something like this causes in Armenia. And then they can point to it and say: Look, they don't want peace," says historian and former MP Tatevik Hayrapetyan. »Pashinyan is already giving them everything they want. He does not talk about ethnic cleansing or the right of return of displaced people. He’s willing to change the constitution.”

The Azerbaijan expert was elected to parliament in her late twenties after the so-called Velvet Revolution in 2018 and belonged to Pashinyan's Civil Contract party. But she is now a sharp critic of his government. »He should have resigned after losing the war and let a new government lead the negotiations. Instead, he clings to power,” she accuses him. Through the nature of his negotiations, he is helping to internationally legitimize the criminal way in which Azerbaijan has gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh. “What kind of message are these diplomats sending to the world, including the EU envoy for the Caucasus, when they go on this tour and have themselves photographed laughing in the conquered Nagorno-Karabakh?” she criticizes. "Territorial integrity is one thing, but a war of aggression remains a war of aggression and ethnic cleansing remains ethnic cleansing."

Azerbaijan demands that Armenia withdraw all complaints related to Azerbaijani crimes of recent years before the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights before signing a peace agreement. In addition, the EU observation mission at the border, which has been monitoring the security situation there since 2023, should begin its work. In Hayrapetyan's view, this shows how much the Aliyev regime cares about its international position.

The EU supports Pashinyan, who sees Armenia as a future candidate for EU membership, in the economic war that Russia is waging (see page 6), but is also interested in good relations with Azerbaijan. Since 2022, the EU has been importing significantly more natural gas from Azerbaijan than before. In July, Chancellor Friedrich Merz received President Aliyev in Berlin and announced that Germany would buy even more oil and natural gas. Accordingly, there is little interest in European capitals in conflicts with their economic partner in Baku, or in scandalizing the suppression of any opposition and free press there. The regime's aggressive anti-Armenian rhetoric is also spoken of cautiously, if at all.

“The Azerbaijani regime consciously communicates very differently externally and internally,” says Hayrapetyan. She has been investigating public debates in the authoritarian country for years. The regime speaks of peace to the outside world, but at the same time it has developed an irredentist ideology according to which Armenia is the historical "West Azerbaijan." This rhetoric has increased, particularly since the victorious war of 2020. In a speech in 2022, Aliyev said: “Armenia has never been present in this region. Today’s Armenia is our country.«

»This threatening rhetoric came two months after Pashinyan clearly recognized the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, including Nagorno-Karabakh, in October 2022. And it's not just Aliyev's individual statements. The state is investing a lot of resources to develop and propagate this “West Azerbaijan” ideology. They hold conferences on it, organize research projects, and it is part of the curricula in universities and schools." So it's not about just putting pressure on Armenia in the short term, warns Hayrapetyan. »This rhetoric is directed against the Armenian state within its current borders. If they were truly interested in lasting peace, then they would not teach the next generation that Armenia exists on historically Azerbaijani land. This authoritarian regime needs anti-Armenian propaganda.”

"If they were really interested in lasting peace, then they would not teach the next generation that Armenia exists on historically Azerbaijani land." Tatevik Hayrapetyan, Azerbaijan expert

Hayrapetyan draws a parallel with how Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Ukrainian independence its historical legitimacy in preparation for his 2022 invasion. Two years ago she published a study with Eduard Abrahamyan in which the two compared how Russia and Azerbaijan use irredentist ideology to legitimize their militarism and to unite the nation against the respective enemy and behind their regime in the spirit of correcting "historical-territorial" disadvantages and "historical injustices."

Even Prime Minister Pashinyan, who usually refrains from criticizing the aggressive Azerbaijani rhetoric, described the "West Azerbaijan narrative" propagated by Azerbaijan in mid-September as a "security threat to the Armenian Republic" and a danger to peace. In the Armenian foreign intelligence service's latest report on security threats to the country, the propagation of the "West Azerbaijan narrative" and talk of a "return to West Azerbaijan" in connection with Azerbaijan's ever-increasing rearmament are listed as key threats.

“Everyone in the region wants peace,” says Eric Hacopian, political consultant and host of a regular online show on the Armenian medium Civil Net. »The people of Armenia, the government of Armenia, and, I am sure, the people of Azerbaijan also want peace. Only Aliyev and the regime he heads cannot use peace.”

Nevertheless, he is optimistic about Armenia's future. »Gross domestic product per capita has doubled since the 2020 war. That is remarkable.” Armenia is integrated into the global IT industry and, thanks to its diaspora, is internationally economically networked. The influx of numerous, often young and well-educated Russians is also strengthening Armenia's economy. As a kind of island of political and economic liberality in the midst of authoritarian states, Armenia has good prospects for the future. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, despite its larger population and its wealth of natural gas and oil, which will, however, run out in the coming decades, is a colossus with feet of clay whose kleptocratically managed economy will stagnate in the long term and whose population will become impoverished.

However, this is precisely what makes the regime in Baku dangerous: “It needs the Armenian enemy to legitimize itself. The threat of decline only makes the option of war even more attractive," warns Hacopian. It is therefore in Armenia's interest to buy time and prepare for a possible future war. A real peace, “one that deserves the name,” is currently not possible between the two countries, is his pessimistic assessment.