In “Revolution or No Revolution,” published in The Nation on October 2, Pietro A. Shakarian sets out to judge eight years of Nikol Pashinyan’s rule in Armenia. How Armenians assess their own government, its economic model, and its quarrel with the church is their business, and it is not for an Azerbaijani analyst to adjudicate. Yet the essay rests its moral case on a story about Azerbaijan, and that story should not go unanswered. In it, Karabakh is simply “Artsakh,” a land with one indigenous people and one history, and the peace now taking shape between Baku and Yerevan is a Western conspiracy against the region. Neither claim survives contact with the record.
Begin with what is missing. Nowhere does the reader learn that in the war of the early 1990s Armenian forces seized not only the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast but also seven surrounding districts of Azerbaijan, where almost no Armenians had ever lived. Roughly one million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced persons. In Khojaly, in February 1992, more than 600 civilians were killed in a single night. Aghdam and Fuzuli, once cities of tens of thousands, were stripped down to their foundations. In 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted four resolutions, 822, 853, 874, and 884, demanding the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territory. They were ignored for 27 years – until Azerbaijan used force to implement them in Second Karabakh War (September 27 – November 10, 2020).
Shakarian compresses all of this into a single clause, in which Armenia “successfully assisted the Karabakh Armenians in their struggle for independence.” A magazine founded by abolitionists, and one that elsewhere defends the right of displaced peoples to go home, should have less difficulty calling an occupation by its name. Military conquest does not become national liberation because the author sympathizes with the conqueror. Nor does the “democratic will” he invokes bear much scrutiny. The so-called independence referendum in Karabakh (1991) was held after the region’s Azerbaijani residents had been expelled, and no state, Armenia included, ever recognized its result.
This is also why the charge of betrayal leveled at Pashinyan over Prague misses the point. When the Armenian prime minister confirmed in October 2022 that the two states recognize each other’s territorial integrity, he was not inventing a new position in order to please the EU. He was reaffirming the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, which Armenia signed and under which the former Soviet republics accepted one another’s existing borders. Every government on earth, including those in Moscow and Tehran that Shakarian would prefer as Armenia’s partners, held the same view throughout the conflict.
Shakarian uses the phrase “ethnic cleansing” four times, always against Azerbaijan. It is worth recalling who in this conflict claimed the practice as an achievement. In footage that surfaced in January 2025 from the first congress of the Yerkrapah Volunteer Union in July 1993, Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, told the assembled veterans that “Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh resolved a 600-year-old problem by completely cleansing the territory of other ethnicities.” Had the 170,000 people of other ethnicities who lived in Armenia until 1988 remained, he added, “we would not have our state.” Vazgen Sargsyan, who led Yerkrapah, warned that the recording must never be made public. This was the man long regarded in the West as the moderate of Armenian politics, boasting of a policy carried out by design. The “democratic legacies” of the Karabakh movement that Shakarian celebrates were built on it.
Nothing comparable can be said of Azerbaijan’s anti-terror operation against the Armenia-installed separatist regime in Karabakh in September 2023. Azerbaijan’s operation lasted about 24 hours and was directed at armed formations that, under the trilateral statement of November 2020, should have left its territory three years earlier. No order of expulsion was issued, and Baku offered the Armenian residents reintegration as citizens. The United Nations mission that visited Khankendi on October 1, 2023, saw no damage to hospitals, schools, or housing, and came across no reports of violence against civilians after the ceasefire. The online reintegration portal Azerbaijan created for the Armenian residents to apply for the Azerbaijani citizenship and return to Karabakh was blocked by the Armenian authorities in the territories of Armenia.
Meanwhile, the return actually under way in Karabakh is one the essay never mentions. Families displaced three decades ago are going home under the state’s Great Return program, to towns rebuilt from rubble and to land sown by Armed Forces of Armenia with more than a million mines. According to Azerbaijan’s mine action agency, those mines have killed or injured 437 people since November 2020.
This is the context for the diplomatic visit that Shakarian presents as a ghoulish danse macabre of “several Western diplomats.” In fact, the trip of September 11 and 12 brought 150 representatives of 58 countries and nine international organizations to Khankendi, Shusha, Aghdara, and Kalbajar. It was the 22nd such visit since 2020. Diplomats touring the sovereign territory of the state to which they are accredited is, as I argued at the time, the ordinary business of diplomacy. To call it complicity is to demand that the world treat a part of Azerbaijan as permanently off limits.
On the Gandzasar and Khudavang (Dadivank) monasteries, which stand intact, Azerbaijan’s view, shared by the country’s Udi Christian community, is that they belong to the legacy of the church of Caucasian Albania, whose catholicosate sat at Gandzasar. Armenian scholars reject this reading, and historians are free to argue the point. What is not open to argument is the fate of Azerbaijani heritage during the occupation. Of the 67 mosques in the occupied territories, 65 were destroyed, and the two left standing were desecrated and used to house livestock. That happened under the very authorities the essay mourns, and it passes without a word.
The geopolitical claims fare no better. If a “Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians” had long been the dream of American neocons as Shakarian argues, Washington had a strange way of pursuing it. In 1992, at the urging of the Armenian-American lobby, Congress passed Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which barred direct aid to the government of Azerbaijan, the country whose territory was under occupation. For three decades the United States, France, and Russia co-chaired the OSCE Minsk Group and produced nothing. No outside patron delivered the settlement. Azerbaijan restored its territorial integrity by its own means, and then it offered peace.
That sequence matters. It was Baku that proposed the basic principles of a peace treaty with Armenia in 2022. The two governments negotiated the text between themselves, finalized it in March 2025, and initialed it in Washington that August. Nor does Azerbaijan fit the role of Western proxy that the essay assigns to it. A country that chaired the Non-Aligned Movement, supplies gas to Europe, trades with Russia and China, and anchors the Middle Corridor to Central Asia is practicing a multi-vector foreign policy of its own design – key elements of the Aliyev doctrine of foreign policy.
The Trump Route, or TRIPP, is likewise not the neocolonial land grab of Shakarian’s telling. The Washington declaration grounds connectivity in respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and jurisdiction of the states concerned. The route gives Azerbaijan an unimpeded link to its Nakhchivan exclave and gives Armenia a place on the east-west trade map from which three decades of occupation had excluded it. As for “creeping territorial claims,” the initialed treaty commits both states to renounce such claims for good. The one legal claim still on the books sits in the preamble of Armenia’s constitution, which refers to a 1989 act on unification with Karabakh. Asking a neighbor to remove a claim to your territory from its basic law is not aggression. It is the minimum that a durable peace requires.
The results are already visible. Last October, President Ilham Aliyev announced that Azerbaijan had lifted all restrictions on cargo transit to Armenia, beginning with a shipment of Kazakh grain, and said that peace between the two countries is “not only on paper but is also in practice.” It is telling that the argument against all this, that peace is a Western plot and Armenia’s true interests lie elsewhere, is heard most insistently in Moscow, which has lost its role as arbiter of the conflict.
Shakarian writes that two Armenias coexist today. Two South Caucasuses are also on offer. One is the region of closed borders, minefields, and refugees that the old status quo sustained for thirty years. The other is a region of open roads and settled frontiers, imperfect and unfinished, but real. His essay asks whether 2018 was a revolution at all. The more consequential question is peace or no peace, and those who dismiss the first chance in a generation have yet to say what they would put in its place.
