Good morning. Over the last few days you have probably heard about a growing crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of ethnic Armenians surrounded by Azerbaijan.
Right now, tens of thousands of people are fleeing the region fearing for their lives and the future of their homeland. Experts expect that over the coming weeks almost all of the estimated 120,000 people who live in Nagorno-Karabakh could leave for Armenia, creating another refugee crisis on the doorstep of Europe.
There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and it’s hard to be up to speed on everything, particularly things that sound complicated. So you’re forgiven if you don’t, yet, know all about it.
Today we will hopefully answer all the important questions: Including where is Nagorno-Karabakh? What is happening? Why is it happening now? Is this related to the war in Ukraine, and what might happen next?
Our guide is Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, who is on the Armenia border witnessing a “staggering stream” of Nagorno-Karabakh refugees entering the country. More after the headlines.
Five big stories
Iraq | More than 100 people have been killed and 150 people injured in a fire at a wedding in northern Iraq. It is not yet clear what caused the blaze, but early reports say it may have broken out after fireworks were lit before the first dance.
Donald Trump | Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House, a New York judge ruled on Tuesday. The ruling found that Trump and executives from his company, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr, routinely and repeatedly deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing assets and exaggerating his net worth.
Asylum | The UN’s refugee agency has rebuked Suella Braverman after she claimed that world leaders had failed to make wholesale reform of human rights laws because of fears of being branded “racist or illiberal”. It came after the home secretary claimed that women and gay people must face more than discrimination if they are to qualify as a refugee
Prisons | Traumatised children in a young offender institution are talking to psychologists through the hatch in their cell doors as there are not enough guards to unlock them for therapy sessions, the Guardian has learned. Many of the teenagers have suffered childhood trauma, with an overrepresentation of autism, ADHD and other neurological disorders.
Politics | Ed Davey has closed the Liberal Democrats’ conference with a pledge to guarantee in law that anyone referred for cancer treatment will be seen in two months. The announcement was arguably the sole big policy of the gathering and reinforces the party’s focus on the NHS before the general election.
In depth: ‘It is a historic exodus, and everyone who’s leaving has a heartbreaking story’
Let’s start with the real basics. Where is Nagorno-Karabakh? It’s a landlocked region in the South Caucasus mountains surrounded by Azerbaijan, about 140km to the east of the border with Armenia. To complicate matters a little more the region is known by Armenians as Artsakh.
What is happening in Nagorno-Karabakh (watch this video for help on how to pronounce it), and why is it happening now? To answer this, Andrew says we need to rewind at least thirty years to the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which led to the messy creation of 15 states.
They included Armenia and Azerbaijan, which both claimed Nagorno-Karabakh. While the land is within Azerbaijan (and the international community recognises it as part of Azerbaijan), it has been run autonomously by its ethnic Armenian population as a de facto independent state since 1994.
“Armenians call it their ancestral homeland, but territorially it is part of Azerbaijan,” Andrew says. “This led to a series of wars over who it really belongs to, which led to the uneasy status quo that it is Armenian within Azerbaijan. It has always been a bone of contention.”
In the last conflict in 2020 – which lasted 44-days – Azerbaijan recaptured seven surrounding districts and took back about a third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. The region is now 3,170 sq km – that’s about twice the size of greater London.
As part of the truce that halted that war, Russia provided peacekeepers to police a road, known as the Lachin corridor, that allowed people to travel between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia.
However, the road has been blocked since December 2022, which has effectively trapped Nagorno-Karabakh people within the territory and led to shortages of food, medicine and baby formula. Azerbaijan denies there is any blockade and says it was forced to act after environmental violations. The Russian peacekeeping troops did not intervene to get traffic moving.
Hostilities restarted on 19 September 2023 when Azerbaijan launched a full scale military offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh. It described it as “an anti-terrorist operation”.
It lasted just over 24 hours, before the local Karabakh government accepted a ceasefire proposal negotiated by Russian peacekeepers. Azerbaijan declared military victory while Armenia accused Azerbaijan of pursuing a “policy of ethnic cleansing”. The majority of Armenians are Christian, and the majority of Azerbaijanis are Muslim.
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Why has this happened now?
Andrew believes Azerbaijan is taking advantage of Russia being “distracted by the war in Ukraine”. “Russia is the big player here, and Armenia is its traditional ally,” he says. “Russia is meant to get involved, but it is a very hard time for Russia with the war in Ukraine taking up a lot of resources.”
Azerbaijan has also, Andrew says, invested heavily in militarisation so the balance of power has shifted. “Azerbaijan wants to end the three decades of self-rule in Karabakh, and take it over.”
Azeri president Ilham Aliyev has said the region would be turned into a “paradise” as part of Azerbaijan.
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What is causing the exodus?
“The ethnic cleansing of Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh is under way, that’s happening just now,” Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan told the US in a plea for help. “And that is [a] very unfortunate fact, because we were trying to urge international community on that,”
Azerbaijan denies it is intent on ethnic cleansing, and said it wants to re-integrate the ethnic Armenians as “equal citizens”.
Andrew says, most Nagorno-Karabakh people aren’t willing take the risk of trusting Azerbaijan, and are fleeing through the – recently re-opened Lachin corridor – to Armenia. Almost 30,000 refugees have already crossed the border out of the estimated 120,000 population of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“It’s been called a negotiated ceasefire, but really there is no negotiation,” Andrew says. “Azerbaijan massively has the upper-hand, so the only thing to negotiate is how Azerbaijan is going to take the territory and what happens when the troops go into the towns and how they treat the people.”
He says the people, who have seen videos of Azeris beheading locals during the 2020 war, aren’t sticking around to find out what might happen this time.
More than 100 people were killed in an explosion at a fuel depot on Monday, which witnesses said struck as people lined up to refuel their cars before evacuating.
Andrew, who spent yesterday talking to refugees as they cross the border, said people say they are “fleeing for their lives” and are angry at the international community for not doing more to protect them.
“There are wave after wave of cars and vans coming over every 10-15 minutes,” he says. “They’re full of people and their belongings latched to the roof. They are making children lie on the floor of minibuses and blocking the windows with cardboard in fear of shelling.
“No one expected this many people to be leaving so quickly. It is a historic exodus, and everyone who’s leaving has a heartbreaking story.”
He has talked to people whose relatives have been killed in shelling and had their homes destroyed, and others who had been forced into hiding for days. “I spoke to a 90-year-old who slept for three days on the floor of the airport terminal [which is controlled by the Russian peacekeepers].”
A father of a four-day old baby told Andrew, that he took the newborn and his six other children to a shelter, before going back to try to protect his house.
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Where will the Nagorno-Karabakh people go?
Pashinyan has said Armenia has allocated space for at least 40,000 people, but warned that he expects the vast majority of the 120,000 people “will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity”.
Andrew says there’s no way Armenia, a country with a population of just under 3 million people, will be able to integrate 100,000 refugees. “It’s going to be hard to find them housing or jobs – it is beginning to look like the beginning of another refugee crisis on the doorstep of Europe.”
What else we’ve been reading
Germany’s vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, a novelist turned green politician with huge ambitions, was once one of the country’s more popular public figures. But soon after he gained access to the levers of power, Russia invaded Ukraine and Germany was plunged into an energy crisis he had to solve. Philip Oltermann’s long read plots how rapidly changing geopolitics and a fraught political landscape turned Habeck’s goals upside down. Nimo
Rat-infested cells, pigeons on the wings and mini phones hidden where the sun don’t shine. The Ministry of Justice refused Helen Pidd permission to visit a prison, so she found ways to speak to inmates and officers about what really goes on behind the prison walls. Rupert
Nearly 1,000 train station ticket offices are due to be closed as a part of “necessary modernisation”. Sam Wollaston went to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, to find out how these closures will affect the 12% of the population who still rely on the staff at ticket offices. Nimo
I love a night train, so maybe the next one to try should be the Doğu Express, which runs east from the Turkish capital, Ankara, towards Kars and the border with Georgia. It takes more than 24 hours, though, as Jamie Fullerton discovers. Rupert
Are you hungry but perennially unsure about what you want to eat? Tim Dowling has picked out 17 recipes that all feature a fried egg as the starting point, centre piece or main ingredient. Nimo
Sport
Football | Sarina Wiegman’s homecoming was not pretty, for her or England. The 2-1 defeat by the Netherlands – could prove incredibly important to Olympic qualification and Euro 2025 seeding.
Figure skating | The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has begun hearing Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s doping case, nineteen months after she helped the Russian Olympic Committee win gold in the team event at the 2022 Beijing Games despite testing positive for a banned substance. The scandal rocked the sport and cast a shadow over Russia’s already embattled anti-doping system.
Safeguarding | Sport England is to invest £15m in a “game-changing” network of 59 professional safeguarding officers to protect children and young people across sport, the Guardian can reveal. The announcement is a response to a series of horrific stories of abuse in gymnastics and multiple other sports, as well as widespread concerns that complaints were not adequately reported or addressed.
The front pages
The Guardian leads with “‘Feminist approach’ to cancer could save 800,000 women’s lives a year”. The Mirror leads on Suella Braverman’s comments on refugees, under the headline “Poisonous”. The Telegraph covers a new report that claims “Lockdown damage to children was ‘preventable’”.
The i says “Private schools go to battle with Labour over 20% Vat in first year of winning power”, while the Mail’s take on the same story is “Labour’s class war begins on day one”.
The Financial Times reports “Amazon uses monopoly to hurt shoppers, says US lawsuit”. The Sun’s front page reads “BA pilot snorts coke off topless woman..then tries to fly plane”.
Today in Focus
Overcrowded and understaffed: life in England’s crumbling prisons
When the 21-year-old terror suspect Daniel Khalife managed to escape from Wandsworth prison earlier this month, apparently on the underside of a van, it turned the spotlight on to what was really going on in England’s jails.
The Guardian’s north of England editor, Helen Pidd, has been investigating the state of prisons and tells Nosheen Iqbal she found in some cases a system close to breaking point. There’s chronic overcrowding, appalling conditions and a decimated workforce. Among it all are stories of staff struggling to cope and prisoners’ rehabilitation often more theory than practice.
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Cal Hunter and Claire Segeren went to an auction in 2018 with the hopes of buying a flat in Glasgow but a fast-talking auctioneer and a mix-up with a lot of numbers left the couple with a derelict Victorian villa that was “on the brink of a collapse” 35 miles away from the city. As Scottish auction bids are legally binding, Hunter and Segeren embarked on a four-and-a-half year journey restoring the dilapidated property – the renovation was so extensive that it garnered global media attention and saw the pair rack up 300,000 Instagram followers. There is even a four-part BBC documentary chronicling the process.
They now have three spacious and high-ceilinged flats, two are holiday lets and one is their home, in Dunoon that mix the Victorian skeleton with contemporary decor. Though it began as a mistake, the pain-staking project has ended in smiles: “Despite everything, I knew quite quickly that this was the house for us,” Hunter says.
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Bored at work?
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