Reversal & Cleansing §

The 44-day war

The Second Karabakh War (27 September - 10 November 2020) reversed the 1992-94 Armenian territorial gains. Azerbaijani forces retook the seven surrounding districts (Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Qubadli, Zangilan, Lachin, Kelbajar in stages) and parts of NKAO including the symbolically central Shusha (8 November) and Hadrut. The 10 November 2020 trilateral statement (Aliyev, Pashinyan, Putin) ended active hostilities and deployed Russian peacekeepers to the residual NKAO and to the Lachin corridor.

The nine-month blockade

The Lachin Corridor blockade began on 12 December 2022, ostensibly as an "environmental protest" by Azerbaijani state-aligned eco-activists but functionally a closure. The March 2022 gas cutoff and the September 2022 Azerbaijani incursion into Armenia proper preceded it. The ICJ February 2023 order, the July 2023 reaffirmation and the November 2023 supplemental order required Azerbaijan to permit unimpeded movement, then to ensure protection of departing Armenians. All three were ignored. The ICRC reported severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel from late 2022; former ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo's August 2023 legal opinion concluded the blockade satisfied Article II(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The 24-hour operation

On 19-20 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military operation across NKAO. The Republic of Artsakh capitulated within hours. From 24 September through early October, more than 100,000 of the approximately 120,000 Armenian inhabitants fled south through the Lachin corridor toward Armenia. The UNHCR registered 100,617 forcibly displaced persons in 11 days. By September 2024, only an estimated 14 ethnic Armenians remained.

Dissolution

The Republic of Artsakh dissolved itself on 1 January 2024. Stepanakert was renamed Khankendi by Azerbaijani authorities and made the seat of Aliyev's post-2024 Karabakh administration. The Russian peacekeepers withdrew in April 2024. The Azerbaijani "Great Return" programme placed approximately 8,500 Azerbaijani settlers across the former NKAO, Lachin, Shusha, Hadrut and Agdam through 2024.

The legal characterisation

The European Parliament resolution of 5 October 2023 used "ethnic cleansing" by 491 votes to 9. The ICJ orders established the international-humanitarian-law framing of unlawful blockade and forcible-transfer protection. No international court has ruled on genocide; mainstream academic characterisation (Crisis Group, Cox-Eibner, Genocide Watch's alert) describes ethnic cleansing with elements of genocidal intent in the prosecutorial sense. The atlas treats the legal characterisation as settled around forced displacement and contested at the genocide threshold; the 2023 events dispute handles the framing in detail.

The remaining open questions

The Zangezur corridor demand (Aliyev, Prague summit 2022; multiple post-2023 statements) continues. The April 2024 border delimitation returned four villages to Azerbaijan from northern Tavush. The April 2025 peace treaty draft, signed in Yerevan and Baku in 2026, remains in implementation. The diaspora policy of Karabakh-Armenian return is unresolved and effectively foreclosed by the post-2024 Azerbaijani state position.

What the period sets

The territorial question is settled by force. The legal questions of accountability for the blockade, the operation and the displacement remain open. The "Western Azerbaijan" frame applied to the Republic of Armenia, prefigured in the 1988-91 expulsion narrative, is now official Azerbaijani-state discourse. The Armenian state position post-2023 is that recognition of the genocide of 1915, accountability for 2023, and a stable border, in that order, are the conditions of normalisation. The atlas's position is that these positions are not symmetric and the historical record is not symmetric, but the documentation must be.