Lachin (district) §

District around the corridor

Lachin district surrounds the road that became the Lachin Corridor. Before 1992 it was an Azerbaijani district lying between Armenia and the former NKAO. Its population was displaced when Armenian forces captured the area in May 1992, shortly after the capture of Shusha. The military result was transformative: Karabakh was no longer an enclave dependent on airlifts and mountain improvisation, but a connected Armenian-controlled space supplied from Goris.

That transformation is why Lachin became the hardest surrounding district to negotiate. Azerbaijani diplomacy grouped it with the occupied districts whose return was required by territorial integrity and UN Security Council resolutions. Armenian diplomacy treated it as qualitatively different because losing it without another security arrangement would expose Karabakh Armenians to blockade or attack. The Minsk Group proposals repeatedly struggled over precisely this distinction. contested

The 2020 trilateral statement returned most of Lachin district to Azerbaijan while preserving a five-kilometre-wide corridor under Russian peacekeepers. Armenian residents withdrew or relocated from the town and nearby villages. Azerbaijan then built and promoted new road infrastructure that bypassed the old Armenian-controlled route and reasserted state control over the district. In April 2023 Azerbaijan established a checkpoint at the corridor entrance, turning the compromise into direct border control and setting the stage for the final blockade phase.

Lachin district is therefore two things at once: a place from which Azerbaijanis were displaced in the 1990s and a place through which Armenians depended for survival until 2023. Any account that recognises only one displacement misses the structure of the conflict. editorial