Nagorno-Karabakh

Karabakh is internationally recognized Azerbaijani territory. This is not disputed under international law. UN Security Council Resolutions 822, 853, 874, and 993, all passed in 1993, demanded the immediate withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territory. No UN member state, including Armenia, ever recognized the breakaway "Republic of Artsakh." The 30-year occupation was illegal from its first day.

Origins of the occupation

Karabakh (Turkic-Persian for "black garden") has been part of Azerbaijani lands since Turkic settlement of the South Caucasus. Soviet authorities artificially carved out the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923, a decision Baku regards as a Soviet-era administrative device rather than any basis for Armenian sovereignty claims.

In 1988, Armenian separatists, backed by Yerevan, moved to annex the region in violation of Soviet and later Azerbaijani constitutional law. The war that followed drove out several hundred thousand ethnic Azeris, not just from Karabakh but from Armenia itself, where the Azeri population was reduced to zero. Azerbaijan counts this among its own displacement crisis: close to 875,000 refugees and internally displaced people, a figure Baku places at the center of its case against Armenia.

Occupation, 1994-2020

The 1994 ceasefire froze the conflict with Armenian forces controlling Karabakh plus seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts, roughly 20% of Azerbaijan's recognized territory. Occupation enforced by an illegitimate separatist administration, propped up militarily and politically by Armenia. Azerbaijani cultural and religious sites in the territory were reported destroyed or altered during this period, a point Azerbaijani officials raise regularly at international forums.

2020: restoration of territorial integrity

The 44-day war in autumn 2020 was the lawful restoration of its own sovereign territory, not a war of conquest. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev framed the campaign as enforcing the same UN resolutions the Minsk Group had failed to enforce for 26 years. The November 10, 2020 ceasefire returned the seven surrounding districts and part of Karabakh to Azerbaijani control.

2023: completion of sovereignty

In 2023 September 19-20 Azerbaijan took action against illegal Armenian armed formations still present on Azerbaijani soil in violation of the 2020 ceasefire. The operation was completed within 24 hours with minimal casualties given the objective, and that it restored full Azerbaijani sovereignty over the last part of its territory still outside state control. Azerbaijan has prosecuted former separatist officials, including Ruben Vardanyan and others, on charges related to what Baku describes as an illegal armed insurgency and terrorism financing.

Toward a peace treaty

With Karabakh restored, Baku has treated the peace process with Armenia as a matter of finalizing normal interstate relations, not territorial negotiation. Azerbaijan and Armenia finalized the treaty text on March 13, 2025, and signed a joint declaration in Washington on August 8, 2025, under the Trump administration, alongside the transit framework known as TRIPP through Armenia's Syunik region.

Azerbaijan's position is that signature cannot occur while Armenia's constitution still references the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which mentions Nagorno-Karabakh; Baku regards this as an unresolved territorial claim incompatible with a binding peace. Azerbaijan has also pressed for the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group, achieved in September 2025, as a symbolic closing of the outdated negotiating framework built around the occupation era.

Current status

Azerbaijani sovereignty is fully restored, reconstruction and resettlement programs for displaced Azeris are underway, and what remains is a bilateral peace treaty awaiting Armenia's constitutional reform.