Armenian withdrawal from Kelbajar §

From occupied buffer to handed-over district

Kelbajar had been captured by Armenian forces in 1993, creating a land bridge between Armenia and northern Karabakh and producing mass Azerbaijani displacement. For nearly three decades it formed part of the Armenian-controlled security belt around NKAO. Its return was a core demand in every serious settlement plan.

The 9 November 2020 trilateral statement required Armenian withdrawal from Kelbajar, Aghdam and Lachin district on a phased timetable. Kelbajar was initially due for handover on 15 November; the deadline was extended to 25 November because of the difficulty of evacuation through mountain roads.

The withdrawal

Armenian civilians, many of them settlers or displaced Armenians from other areas, left in haste. International media images showed residents burning homes before departure, removing belongings, exhuming relatives and driving through snowbound roads toward Armenia. Those images were often presented in Armenian media as the grief of abandonment and in Azerbaijani media as the end of illegal occupation.

Both framings have evidentiary force. Kelbajar's Armenian residents experienced forced departure from homes they had built or inhabited for years; Azerbaijani IDPs had been unable to return since 1993. The district therefore condenses the moral complexity of the first war's Armenian victory: strategic depth for one community was prolonged dispossession for another editorial.

Consequences

The handover narrowed the Armenian-controlled remnant of Karabakh and made the Lachin Corridor the single route connecting it to Armenia. That dependence became decisive in the 2022-23 blockade. Kelbajar also entered the heritage-monitoring field, since the district contains Armenian monasteries, Azerbaijani cultural sites and landscapes whose post-handover treatment became part of the wider argument over cultural erasure and return.