A ceasefire agreement has been reached a day after Azerbaijan launched a new military offensive against the local Armenian government in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, potentially averting a wider war but threatening the long-term existence of the ethnic Armenian enclave there.
The agreement took effect at 1pm local time and includes provisions for the local Armenian government to disband its local military, in a capitulation to Azerbaijan.
In a televised address on Wednesday night, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, claimed victory, saying that the country had “restored its sovereignty” over its territory after the 24-hour offensive. Aliyev praised his army and claimed it had achieved the “complete surrender” of local Armenian fighters.
In the speech, he blamed a “criminal junta” for the conflict and said it appeared that local Armenians from Karabakh had “forgotten that they live in Azerbaijan”. He said the Azerbaijani army would not engage in reprisals against the local population.
Estimates of the number killed in the assault range from dozens to hundreds.
One official in Nagorno-Karabakh said at least 200 people had been killed and more than 400 wounded after Azerbaijan launched what it described as an “anti-terrorist operation” in the disputed South Caucasus region on Tuesday.
Gegham Stepanyan, the region’s rights ombudsman, said that at least 10 civilians were among the dead, five of them children.
Officials in the regional capital, Stepanakert, and in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, confirmed that representatives would meet in Yevlakh, in Azerbaijan, on Thursday for negotiations. Azerbaijan, which has demanded the dissolution of the local government in Nagorno-Karabakh, said the talks would include plans for the reintegration of the region into Azerbaijan.
Later, an adviser to Aliyev said it had readied a “plan for the reintegration of the Armenian population of Karabakh”. Officials in the breakaway region of Stepanakert have accused Baku of preparing a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”.
The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, told Aliyev to protect the rights of ethnic Armenians in the region and “ensure full ceasefire and safe, dignified treatment by Azerbaijan of Karabakh Armenians”.
“Their human rights and security need to be ensured. Access needed for immediate humanitarian assistance,” Michel wrote in a post on social media.
In a statement, the breakaway government in Stepanakert cited an agreement to “pull out the remaining detachments and troops of the Armenian armed forces from the zone of deployment of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, to disband and fully disarm armed units of the Nagorno-Karabakh defence army, and pull out heavy hardware and weapons from the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh for the sake of their soonest possible disposal.”
Both sides said the agreement had been mediated by a local Russian peacekeeping force that has been deployed in the region since war broke out in 2020.
Local officials earlier said 27 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan launched its new offensive.
Although fighting died down after the announcement of the ceasefire, shelling continued on Wednesday evening.
An unknown number of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh were killed on Wednesday after the car they were driving came under fire, Russia’s defence ministry said. It did not say who was behind the shooting.
Photographs have shown thousands of ethnic Armenian civilians crowding into a local airport protected by Russian peacekeepers. The Russian defence ministry said 2,261 civilians, including 1,049 children, were being sheltered at the base at Khojali airport near Stepanakert.
On Wednesday, Vladimir Putin rejected criticism that Russian peacekeepers had stood aside while Azerbaijan reignited the conflict. “Our peacekeepers are working very actively with all parties involved in the conflict,” he said, while meeting the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, in St Petersburg. “They are doing everything possible to protect the civilian population.”
Artak Beglaryan, a former adviser to the breakaway government who is now in Stepanakert, said more than 200 people were believed to have been killed. “The situation is quite disastrous,” he said. “Nagorno-Karabakh is now separated into a few parts because the Azerbaijani side has occupied some strategic heights and roads … We are under local additional blockade and siege by the Azerbaijani forces.”
Azerbaijani officials had demanded that the local government dissolve and dismantle its military formations as a precondition to negotiations. Ruben Vardanyan, a former head of the local administration, cited higher casualties in what he told Reuters was the beginning of a “big war”.
Although Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory, part of it is run by local Armenian authorities who say the area is their ancestral homeland. The region has been at the centre of two wars since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the latest in 2020.
The Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, said on Wednesday he supported the ceasefire and it was “very important” that it held.
His administration has distanced itself from the breakaway republic, saying Armenia had not stationed any troops in the region and that he was not involved in the negotiations over the ceasefire.
“We hope that military escalation will not continue, because in the current conditions it is very important to ensure stability and stop combat actions,” Pashinyan said in a televised address to Armenians.
Protests in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, continued on Wednesday despite the announcement of the ceasefire. Thousands gathered in Yerevan’s central Republic Square to express their anger with Pashinyan’s government, as well as what they see as the failures of Russia and the west to protect the lives of ethnic Armenians.
“I came here today because there is still a small amount of hope that we can save our country,” said protester Alexan Yesiyan, 47, an education official.
“The first thing we need to get rid of the traitors who control the levers of power in Armenia.”
Most of the demonstration passed off peacefully, but after people had started to leave Republic Square, several hundred demonstrators attacked lines of riot police in front of government buildings.
Dozens of windows were smashed by rock-throwing protesters, and there were repeated scuffles.
One police officer suffered a head injury and was rushed to an ambulance.
Protesters chanted “Artsakh, Artsakh, Artsakh!” – the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh – and “Nikol is a traitor!”
There was despair in the crowd at what protesters describe as the capitulation of local defence forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, and calls for Armenia to intervene.
Azerbaijan’s defence ministry announced the start of the operation on Tuesday, saying frontline positions and military assets of Armenia’s armed forces were being “incapacitated using high-precision weapons” and that only legitimate military targets were being attacked.
Armenia’s foreign ministry denied that its weapons or troops were in Nagorno-Karabakh and called reports of sabotage and landmines in the region “a lie”.
Nagorno-Karabakh and sizeable surrounding territories had been under ethnic Armenian control since the end of a war in 1994, but Azerbaijan regained the territories and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh during the 2020 fighting. That ended with an armistice placing Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh.
