Armenian–Azerbaijani war (1918–1920)
1918-20 series of territorial conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan
The Armenian-Azerbaijani war (1918–1920) was a conflict that took place in the South Caucasus in regions with a mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani population, broadly encompassing what are now modern-day Azerbaijan and Armenia. It began during the final months of World War I and ended with the establishment of Soviet rule.
The conflict took place against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War and the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Mutual territorial claims, made by the newly formed Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and the Republic of Armenia, led to their respective support for Azerbaijani and Armenian militias in the disputed territories. Armenia fought against Azerbaijani militias in the Erivan Governorate of the former Russian Empire, while Azerbaijan fought Armenian claims to the Karabakh region. The war was characterized by outbreaks of massacres and ethnic cleansing (such as the March Days, the September Days, the Shusha massacre, and more broadly, the massacres of Azerbaijanis in Armenia), which changed the demographics of the region.
Hostilities broadly came to an end when the Soviet 11th Army invaded and occupied both Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Background
War proper
On 30 March 1918, the Soviets, based on the unsubstantiated report that the Muslim crew of the ship Evelina was armed and ready to revolt against the Soviets, disarmed the crew, which tried to resist. This led to three days of fighting, resulting in the death of up to 12,000 Azerbaijanis.
Fight for Baku and Karabakh, 1918–19
At the same time the Baku Commune was involved in heavy fighting with the advancing Caucasian Ottoman Army in and around Ganja.
“Armenian–Azerbaijani war (1918–1920)” enters the record as 1918-20 series of territorial conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Armenian, Azerbaijani and 1918-20 can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Armenian–Azerbaijani war (1918–1920)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Armenian, Azerbaijani and 1918-20 provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2015687. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1918 and 1920.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Armenian–Azerbaijani war (1918–1920)” 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.