The Emptying of Artsakh

On 12 December 2022 the only road out of Artsakh closed. It stayed closed, in one form or another, for nine months and twelve days. When it opened again, it opened in one direction.

One road#

The corridor was an artifact of drawn borders. When the Soviet state created the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast in 1923, its boundaries were traced so that the region, though about 90 percent Armenian, touched Soviet Armenia at no point.¹ A narrow strip of intervening territory separated the two. In May 1992, in the first war, Karabakh Armenian forces took the town on the connecting road, soon renamed Berdzor, and broke a blockade that had cut the enclave off for nearly four years; contemporaneous reporting described convoys of food and medicine reaching a population that had spent months in cellars.²

The ceasefire that ended the 44-day war of 2020 reduced Artsakh's connections to that single thread. The nine-point statement signed by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia on 9 November 2020 placed the Berdzor corridor under the protection of Russian peacekeepers and guaranteed the movement of citizens, vehicles, and cargo in both directions.³ Roughly 120,000 Armenians lived at the far end of it. Nearly everything they consumed came in by that road. The UN Security Council was later told that about 90 percent of the region's food had been imported from Armenia before the blockade.⁴

The blockade#

The demonstrators who closed the road presented themselves as environmental activists protesting mining operations. The UN Security Council met in emergency session on 20 December 2022, and member states urged that the corridor be reopened.⁵ The European Parliament, in a resolution of 19 January 2023, described the closure as a blockade, noted the protesters' connection to the government of Azerbaijan, and demanded that Azerbaijan reopen the road.⁶ Food imports largely stopped, and medical evacuations stalled.

The International Court of Justice had already entered the case. In December 2021, in Armenia's suit under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Court had ordered Azerbaijan to protect Armenian detainees from the 2020 war, to prevent the incitement of racial hatred against Armenians, and to prevent and punish vandalism and desecration of Armenian cultural heritage. Provisional measures of the ICJ are legally binding on the parties.⁷

On 22 February 2023, by thirteen votes to two, the Court ordered Azerbaijan to "take all measures at its disposal to ensure unimpeded movement of persons, vehicles and cargo along the Lachin Corridor in both directions." It found a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm from blocked medical evacuations and shortages of food and medicine.⁸

Azerbaijan then installed an official checkpoint on the corridor in April 2023. Armenia asked the Court to modify its order in response. On 6 July 2023 the Court declined to modify the order and reaffirmed it instead. The binding obligation stood. The road stayed shut.⁹

By August the closure was total. At a second emergency session of the Security Council, on 16 August 2023, the UN humanitarian office reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross had been unable to bring assistance through the Berdzor corridor, or through any other route, for several weeks.¹⁰ Nine days before that session, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the founding Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, issued an expert opinion concluding there was "a reasonable basis to believe that a Genocide is being committed" against the Armenians of Artsakh. The blockade, he argued, was the deliberate infliction on a group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, the act defined in Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.¹¹

The diplomatic ground had meanwhile shifted under the besieged region. In Prague on 6 October 2022, Armenia and Azerbaijan jointly reaffirmed the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, which fixed the former Soviet republican borders as the borders of the successor states; Artsakh lay on Azerbaijan's side of that line.¹² On 22 May 2023, in the blockade's sixth month, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that Armenia and Azerbaijan should recognize each other's territorial integrity of 29,800 and 86,600 square kilometers respectively. The larger figure includes Artsakh.^13,14

The nineteenth of September#

On 19 September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military assault across Artsakh, shelling positions and settlements including Stepanakert and demanding the disbanding of the Artsakh government and the complete disarmament of its forces.¹⁵ The population under attack had been under blockade for nine months. Within 24 hours, the outgunned Karabakh Armenian forces accepted a Russian-mediated ceasefire on Azerbaijan's terms.¹⁶ The Artsakh authorities reported at least 200 people killed and hundreds wounded. Those figures come from the Armenian side and have not been independently verified.¹⁵

Ten days#

The exodus began on 24 September. Families drove and were driven down the one road that had been sealed against them since December. On 25 September, at a fuel depot near Berkadzor where evacuees were queuing for gasoline, an explosion killed at least 68 people; the flight continued without pause.¹⁷ Between 24 September and 4 October 2023, United Nations agencies recorded 100,632 refugee arrivals in Armenia, from a population of roughly 120,000.^18,19 UNHCR and the Armenian government launched a 97 million dollar refugee response plan for their reception.¹⁹

Not everyone reached the border. On 27 September, Azerbaijani border officers detained the former State Minister Ruben Vardanyan at the corridor checkpoint as he traveled with the refugee flow. In the following days Azerbaijan arrested the former presidents Arayik Harutyunyan, Bako Sahakyan, and Arkadi Ghukasyan, the parliament speaker Davit Ishkhanyan, and other officials.^20,21

On 28 September, President Samvel Shahramanyan signed a decree dissolving all state institutions of the Republic of Artsakh effective 1 January 2024. The decree was signed under the terms of the capitulation.^22,23 It ended more than three decades of de facto statehood.

On 5 October 2023 the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that the flight of over 100,000 Armenians from Artsakh amounted to ethnic cleansing, and demanding guarantees for their rights and security, including the right of return.²⁴

After#

The peacekeepers whose presence had defined the corridor left early. Russia announced the withdrawal of its contingent in April 2024, a year and a half before the mandate's formal end, and completed it by 12 June 2024.^25,26

The legal record kept growing. On 17 November 2023 the ICJ issued a further binding order requiring Azerbaijan to ensure that those who left Artsakh after 19 September 2023 and wish to return may do so in a safe, unimpeded, and expeditious manner, to keep those who remained or returned free from force and intimidation, and to protect the registration, identity, and property documents and records of the population.²⁷ In November 2024 the Court rejected Azerbaijan's preliminary objections and confirmed its jurisdiction over Armenia's case.²⁸ The merits remain pending, with Armenia's next written pleading due in October 2026.²⁹

In Baku, the detained leadership went before a military court in January 2025, sixteen Armenians tried together on sweeping charges, in closed proceedings that rights organizations asked to have internationally monitored and that the European Parliament described as sham trials.^30,31 In February 2026 the court sentenced five former officials, Harutyunyan among them, to life imprisonment, gave the former presidents Ghukasyan and Sahakyan 20-year terms, and sentenced Vardanyan to 20 years after nearly 60 closed hearings. Amnesty International called the verdicts the culmination of a travesty of a trial and noted that international law prohibits trying civilians before military courts.^32,20

The peace process moved on without them. The joint declaration signed in Washington on 8 August 2025, alongside the initialed text of a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, contains no provisions on the return of the Karabakh Armenians and none on the detainees in Baku.^33,34

What documentation means now#

A cuneiform inscription of the Urartian king Sardur II, carved in the 8th century BCE, records the land of Urtekhe, which scholars locate within Artsakh and treat as the likely precursor of its name.³⁵ Across the twenty-eight centuries between that inscription and October 2023, through kingdom, partition, melikdom, empire, massacre, and war, an Armenian population lived on that land. It no longer does. For the first time since antiquity, Artsakh is without Armenians.

What remains is a record, and the record is now contested ground. The ICJ's November 2023 order treats the documents themselves, the registers, the identity papers, the titles to property, as objects in need of protection.²⁷ Monitoring from orbit has replaced the site visits that are no longer possible. Caucasus Heritage Watch, a Cornell and Purdue project, tracks more than 500 Armenian heritage sites in the region by satellite; its reports have documented the eradication of six heritage sites in late 2022 and early 2023, continuing bulldozer damage to two historic Armenian cemeteries, the partial collapse of the 19th-century Tandzatap church, and a record seven sites currently under threat.³⁶

Documentation is not a substitute for return. The right of return exists in a binding order of the International Court of Justice; the road it requires is closed. But every claim in the pending cases rests on evidence. Any future restitution rests on records of who lived where and owned what. And whatever is destroyed unrecorded is lost twice, once on the ground and once in memory. To document Artsakh now is less an act of remembrance than custody of a legal and historical record that there are standing incentives to erase. That custody is the work this section of the site exists to do.