2023 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh
2023 military offensive against the self-declared breakaway state of Artsakh
On 19 and 20 September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive against the self-declared breakaway state of Artsakh, violating the ceasefire agreement signed in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. The offensive took place in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is de jure a part of Azerbaijan, and was a de facto independent republic. The stated goal of the offensive was the complete disarmament and unconditional surrender of Artsakh, as well as the withdrawal of all Armenian soldiers present in the region. The offensive occurred in the midst of an escalating crisis caused by Azerbaijan's 10-month-long blockade of Artsakh, which resulted in significant scarcities of essential supplies such as food, medicine, and other goods.
One day after the offensive started on 20 September, a ceasefire agreement described as a written agreement for the surrender of Artsakh was reached at the mediation of the Russian peacekeeping contingent where it was agreed that the Artsakh Defence Army would be disarmed. Ceasefire violations by Azerbaijan were nonetheless reported by both Artsakhi residents and officials until early October. On 28 September, the president of Artsakh, Samvel Shahramanyan signed a decree to dissolve all state institutions by 1 January 2024, bringing the existence of the breakaway state to an end.
The offensive and subsequent surrender resulted in the expulsion of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, in which nearly the entire population fled to Armenia through the Lachin corridor. Human rights organizations and experts in genocide prevention issued multiple alerts that the region's Armenian population was at risk or actively being subjected to ethnic cleansing and genocide, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Background
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians until the offensive.
“2023 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh” enters the record as 2023 military offensive against the self-declared breakaway state of Artsakh. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Azerbaijani, offensive and Nagorno-Karabakh can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “2023 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.