Bako Sahakyan §

Bako Sahakyan was president of the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic from 2007 to 2020. A security official by background, he governed through the long late-ceasefire period: negotiations stagnated, the line of contact militarised, Azerbaijan's oil revenues transformed the balance of power, and the April 2016 Four-Day War revealed that the Armenian military position was no longer static or guaranteed. Sahakyan maintained the institutions of de facto statehood but could not alter the diplomatic reality that NKR remained outside recognition and dependent on Armenia. His tenure ended shortly before the 2020 war, which destroyed the territorial order over which he had presided. He is therefore a figure of maintenance rather than transformation: the administrator of a system that looked durable until it suddenly was not.