A day, after Azerbaijan declared it had brought the separatist area back under its control, an adviser to the leader of the ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, said on Thursday that the people there need security guarantees before laying up their weapons.

After a quick Azerbaijani onslaught caused the rebels to agree to disarm on Wednesday, Armenian officials in Karabakh accused Azerbaijan of breaking the ceasefire.
Accusations that Azerbaijani military violated the truce were deemed “completely false” by the country’s defence ministry in Baku. Heavy gunfire was reported by two sources in Karabakh’s capital city to Reuters on Thursday morning, however it was unclear who was responsible.
Despite an agreement reached 24 hours earlier, in which Azerbaijan announced it had restored its sovereignty over Karabakh after 35 years of conflict, the shooting and the contradictory narratives emphasised the potential for additional violence.
An aide to Nagorno-Karabakh’s separatist ethnic Armenian leader Samvel Shahramanyan told Reuters, “We have an agreement on the cessation of military action but we await a final agreement – talks are going on.”
When asked if he would be willing to give up his guns, Babayan replied that his people could not be left to perish without first receiving enough security guarantees.
He said, “A lot of issues still need to be fixed.” “At any time they can start killing us off completely.”
After imposing a de facto blockade for the previous nine months, Azerbaijan stated it will comply with a request to deliver fuel and humanitarian goods to Karabakh.
Talks between Azerbaijan and the Republic of Artsakh (what the Karabakh Armenians call themselves) took place in the Azerbaijani city of Yevlakh.
Azerbaijan, a predominantly Muslim country, has repeatedly disputed allegations of racial cleansing and expressed a desire for the peaceful “reintegration” of the region’s Christian Armenian minority.
On Wednesday, President Ilham Aliyev promised full cultural and religious freedom for the Armenian people while also using severe nationalist rhetoric.
When fighting for “Azerbaijan, for dignity, for the Motherland,” people of all backgrounds and faiths will be able to raise “one fist,” he promised on national television.
Junta of criminals
Karabakh is a breakaway region of Azerbaijan that declared independence in the 1990s during the Soviet Union’s dissolution but is still officially considered part of Azerbaijan internationally.
Aliyev has long dreamed of regaining power, and on Tuesday he launched a fast military attack that quickly breached Armenian lines in Karabakh.
Authorities in Karabakh estimated that at least 200 of their people had been slain. Without providing exact numbers, Aliyev announced that “martyrs” had been lost and that additional Azerbaijani soldiers had been wounded.
Aliyev directed his ire at Karabakh’s leadership in his address to the country, saying, “After the surrender of the criminal junta, this source of tension, this den of poison, has already been consigned to history.”
It’s a terrible loss for the separatists and for Armenia, which fought two wars with Azerbaijan over the course of 30 years and supported its relatives in the enclave in their fight for independence.
In a speech commemorating Armenia’s independence day, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan acknowledged the “untold physical and psychological suffering” of Armenians.
But he insisted that peace was crucial for the future of his nation.
Plan for Peace
On Wednesday, Aliyev warned that if Armenia didn’t try to stop Baku’s offensive, there would be one less thing standing in the way of peace between the two Caucasus neighbours. According to a source by Russia’s RIA news agency, an advisor to Aliyev indicated that Baku had sent Yerevan a new draught peace accord.
Russia, which has peacekeepers in the region, did little to stop the Azerbaijani attack, which enraged many Armenians who had previously seen Moscow as a defender of their rights.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Interfax as saying that Moscow now considers the question of who Karabakh belongs to to be settled, and that this represents significant progress towards a peace settlement.
Thousands of Armenians took to the streets of Yerevan on Wednesday night to protest the government’s lack of action to preserve Karabakh.
Despite losing Karabakh to Azerbaijan in a six-week conflict in 2020 and being re-elected a few months later, Pashinyan has been the target of calls for his resignation.
Many ethnic Armenians in Karabakh have abandoned their houses in the last three days, congregating at the city’s airport and seeking refuge with Russian forces.
Armenian men in a column of around 20 cars waited on the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan, on a secluded hillside near the village of Kornidzor, awaiting their friends and relatives who were trapped in Karabakh.
A guy who only wanted to be identified as “Hayk” said he had waited for days at the border in vain for his father, who had been working in Karabakh when the blockade was placed in December and had been stuck there ever since.
Residents of Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh (known in Azerbaijan as Khankendi), reported a lack of electricity, empty stores, and people cooking over makeshift fires in courtyards.
To paraphrase a local business owner, “there are a lot of displaced people from the villages, they were just moved to the city and had nowhere to spend the night,” said Gayane Sargsyan.
In a voicemail to Reuters, she expressed concern that the public was in “chaos and bewilderment” due to the uncertainty of the situation.