Ruben Vardanyan via Twitter 

On 3 October, media reported that Arkhady Ghukasyan, Bako Sahakyan, and Arayik Harutyunyan had been apprehended and transferred from Karabakh to Baku, where they face multiple charges stemming from crimes allegedly committed under their de facto leadership of the small separatist region situated within Azerbaijan.

Those reports were effectively confirmed today and follow last week’s detention of several other high-level de facto officials in the wake of Azerbaijan’s 19 September military operation in the region. Among them is Russian-Armenian businessman and former de facto State Minister Ruben Vardanyan.

 

On 28 September, a Baku court placed Vardanyan in pre-trial detention for four months. He faces charges of financing terrorism, illegally crossing the border, and membership of an illegal armed group.

 

Despite the significance of Vardanyan, Ghukasyan, and Sahakyan’s arrest, Arayik Harutyunyan was likely especially high-priority given his public admission of authorizing missile attacks on Ganja during the 2020 Karabakh war.

 

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The full article can be read here.

Armenia-Azerbaijan border © Onnik James Krikorian 1994

On 28 September 2023, Samvel Shahramanyan, de facto leader of what remains of the former Soviet-era Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO), signed a decree dissolving the unrecognized entity mainly inhabited by ethnic Armenians but situated within the territory of Azerbaijan. Truth be known, however, it effectively ended on 9 November 2020 when the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia signed a trilateral ceasefire statement to end the bitter fighting that had raged for six weeks beforehand.

However, some might argue that the writing was on the wall even in 1998 when Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, was forced to resign by then Prime Minister Robert Kocharyan, former Defence Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, and Interior Minister Serzh Sargsyan, with the full support of then de facto Karabakh leader Arkhady Ghukasyan. Ter-Petrosyan warned what would happen next if proposals from the now defunct OSCE Minsk Group were not accepted, but few listened. Instead, complacency set in with later negotiations increasingly resembling imitation.  

 

Even the Madrid or Basic Principles put on the table in the late 2000s by the OSCE Minsk Group, offering Armenia and Karabakh significantly more than it received in 2020, were not taken seriously and finally derailed when Nikol Pashinyan, giddy with euphoria from coming to power following street protests in 2018, walked away from those proposals or variants thereof. A series of miscalculations and reckless steps by the inexperienced politician, a former journalist, led to even more infuriation and impatience in Baku.  

 

By 2020, the path to war seemed irreversible. Since 2011, it had already been considered inevitable. And though the November 2020 trilateral ceasefire statement should have highlighted what the final outcome of nearly three decades of continuous conflict would look like, many in Armenia and Karabakh preferred to ignore the reality and instead prayed for a miracle. Even many among those organizations and commentators funded to ostensibly work towards peace also appeared to bet on a new status quo rather than accept this new reality.  

 

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The full opinion piece can be read here.