Armenia: the arms trade behind the emptying of Karabakh
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In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh. It lasted twenty-four hours. Within roughly a week, more than 100,000 Armenians — effectively the entire population of the territory — had left.
They left because the alternative had already been demonstrated. For nine months beforehand, Azerbaijan had blockaded the Lachin corridor, the single road connecting Karabakh to Armenia, cutting off food, fuel and medicine to a population of around 120,000.
The displacement is often described in the passive voice, as though a population simply drained away. It did not. It was produced.
Where the weapons came from
This is the part that connects Armenia to the rest of this site, and it is well documented rather than inferred.
According to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Azerbaijan sourced 69% of its major weapons imports from Israel in the period leading up to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. That included Harop and Harpy loitering munitions — drones that circle a target area and destroy themselves on impact — which were used in both the 2020 war and the 2023 offensive.
The trade runs in both directions. Azerbaijan supplies a substantial share of Israel’s oil. For a period, arms exports to Azerbaijan accounted for around 17% of Israel’s total arms exports.
CNN and Israeli outlets including the Times of Israel reported that in the weeks before the September 2023 assault, Azerbaijani military cargo aircraft flew repeatedly between a southern Israeli airbase and an airfield near Nagorno-Karabakh.
None of this makes Armenia’s case identical to any other on this site. It does mean that the same arms industry appears in more than one of these stories, which is a fact worth stating plainly rather than implying.
The older wound
Armenians are also still waiting for the Turkish state to acknowledge the genocide of 1915. The phrase carried at commemorations every 24 April — Yes hishum yem yev pahanjum yem, I remember and I demand — contains both halves of that: the remembering, and the demand that it be recognised.
Recognition is not a symbolic matter to the people asking for it. It is the difference between a documented historical crime and a contested claim, and it shapes what can be said about everything that came after.
Where things stand
On 8 August 2025 the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Washington, signed a joint declaration and initialled a seventeen-article peace agreement. It has not been signed. Azerbaijan has said it will not sign until Armenia removes territorial claims from its constitution, a process that requires a referendum and is not expected to conclude before late 2026 at the earliest.
Armenia has meanwhile agreed to the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group, made unilateral concessions on border delimitation, and in practice given up on the return of Karabakh’s displaced population.
The pattern that holds here too
In 2018, Armenians removed their own government through the Velvet Revolution — weeks of sustained street protest, ending in the resignation of the sitting prime minister, without a single protester killed.
Every country on this list has a moment like that in its recent past. It is consistently the part that gets the least coverage.