Nagorno-Karabakh updates: 70,500 refugees have crossed into Armenia

That’s it from our Live team today, thank you for joining us.

You can keep up with the latest developments by reading our news story on the dissolution of the breakaway government in Nagorno-Karabakh here.

We also have a comprehensive analysis piece, and don’t forget to listen to our podcast for additional details.

We’re going to bring our live coverage shortly to an end. Here’s a summary of Thursday’s main events:

• Thousands of ethnic Armenians are still leaving Nagorno-Karabakh more than a week after Azerbaijan took control of the mountainous region in a swift military offensive.
• The number of people to have crossed into Armenia by early Thursday afternoon was reported to have exceeded 70,000, out of an estimated population of 120,000.
• Meanwhile, ethnic Armenian authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh said their self-declared Republic of Artsakh would “cease to exist” by January 1.

Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith is in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, where, he says, the mood is one of shock.

“This is a real tragedy and disaster for the Armenian people,” he said.

“It has been so swift and sudden that people are shocked,” added Smith, noting that “tens of thousands of people over the last 30 years have died fighting for and against the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh”.

Nikolay Mitrokhin, of Germany’s University of Bremen, has outlined the trends and miscalculations by Armenians that led to last week’s developments.

One of them, he told Al Jazeera, was demography.

“Understandably, even 140,000 could not withstand a much larger and growing population of Azerbaijan,” he said, referring to Nagorno-Karabakh’s population.

The second biggest problem was military.

The separatists, Armenia and worldwide Armenian diaspora invested little in the construction of the second line of defence installation, especially strongholds in the mountains, Mitrokhin said. Instead, they relied on obsolete stratagems and did not take into account new developments battle-tested in the Middle East.

“They badly disguised military equipment, simply didn’t rack their brains about it,” Mitrokhin said about the 2020 war that ended with major Azerbaijani gains. “They omitted Baku’s efforts to modernise its military in the 2010s and didn’t buy drones and jeep-mounted mobile artillery units.”

In Azerbaijan, the news of the formal end to the self-declared republic has been met with jubilation.

“Today is a historic day, and we have to pay dues to Aliyev and the Azeri soldiers,” Baku-based analyst Emil Mustafayev told Al Jazeera.

“Today, we are witnessing how separatism ended on Azerbaijan’s territory,” he said, adding that he thinks the conflict is “definitely” over.

Mustafayev argued that a “new stage” of development is ahead of Azeris and ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh as the latter were guaranteed full citizenship rights.

“Of course, the beginning will be hard, there’s distrust,” he said. “But I am sure that in 10 years, we’ll observe another picture, with the developed Karabakh and happy Armenians.”

However, more than 80 percent of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian population has already left the region and most of the remaining residents are likely to move too.

After more than 32 years of unrecognised independence, the self-styled republic in Nagorno-Karabakh will soon be dissolved – will this put an end to decades of tensions and hostilities?

Find out in this report by Mansur Mirovalev.

These aerial shots provided by Maxar Technologies display the long traffic jams seen on Wednesday along the Lachin Corridor, which is the only connection from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.

The mass exodus continued on Thursday, with more than 70,000 people having now fled the remote mountainous region.

Stefan Meister, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, has spoken to Al Jazeera about the events unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh.

• On the importance of the region for Armenia and Azerbaijan:

“The control over Nagorno-Karabakh and winning this war in the beginning of the 1990s was very important for nation-building in Armenia – but also losing the war was very important for nation-building in Azerbaijan.

“So I think this conflict has driven both countries over decades.”

• On the consequences for Armenia following last week’s events:

“It’s a complete reversal of the whole situation which we had before. People in Karabakh hope for help, not only from the Russian so-called peacekeepers but also from the Armenian state.

“We see now this exodus of Armenians from Karabakh; this means that there will be no Armenians left any more in Karabakh.

“People also blame the government in Yerevan that it didn’t help them to survive. So I think there’s a lot of angry people now coming to Yerevan and there is a danger for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan personally but also for the Armenian state to deal with this and also to integrate these people who hoped for more help in the past.”

The latest episode by Al Jazeera’s podcast series, The Take, explains how we got here and what might happen next.

Listen below:

George Avanesyan, a 21-year-old who recently arrived in Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh, told Al Jazeera leaving the troubled region was a matter of life and death.

“We had the option to stay somewhere that is not ours anymore – and that decision was made by someone else, or to leave and save our lives.

“Everyone took something different for themselves. We decided to take as many photos as possible.

“It took 41 hours to reach Goris. My sister’s kids could not bear the long trip. They wanted to walk sometimes and breathe in some air, but it was impossible as there were Azeris and it was dangerous. We advanced one metre every 20 minutes, or waited at the same spot for 10 hours. Azerbaijanis were fake nice and they wanted to record everything at the only checkpoint that was theirs, to show off later.”

Al Jazeera could not independently verify Avanesyan’s claims on the actions of Azerbaijani officials.

We’ve been speaking to some of the refugees who have fled Stepanakert, the central city in Karabakh which is known as Khakendi to Azerbaijan.

Shogher Sargsyan, 23, arrived in Goris, in southern Romania Armenia – the town at the heart of the exodus, on Thursday.

“We decided to leave as soon as we were informed about the occupation of Artsakh and the disbandment of the Artsakh Defence Army,” Sargsyan said, using the name Armenians self-styled Nagorno-Karabakh as.

“We did not want to leave our home, but it is impossible for Armenians to live as part of Azerbaijan, it is like agreeing to a slow and humiliating death. We were afraid that the road would close and we would be taken hostage.

“We were forced to leave in our car with the whole family – nine people, four of them children. We found gasoline with great difficulty. It took us 38 hours to come to Armenia. We stood on the road for a day, it seemed to me it would never end. It was painful and heartbreaking.”

Azerbaijan does not want a mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and is not encouraging anyone to leave the region, Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the UK, told the Reuters news agency.

Baku had not yet had a chance to prove what Suleymanov said was its sincere commitment to provide secure and better living conditions for those ethnic Armenians who choose to stay.

Yet, years of mutual distrust, violence and war between the two rivals has made many Armenians fear the prospect of co-habitation with people from Azerbaijan.

“I don’t know anybody here, any Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh that could imagine being integrated and being safe at the same time,” a resident of the region told Al Jazeera last week in the wake of the ceasefire agreement.

“The only thing we are sure about is that we can’t trust the Azerbaijani,” she said.

As ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh leave their homes and deal with the prospect that they may never return, some residents in Baku celebrate the end of the self-declared region.

“The process of the separatist capitulation has now reached its inevitable conclusion, with the self-dissolution of the illegal regime in Khankendi,” said Kamala Mammadova, a resident of the Azeri capital.

“This marks another significant victory for our country, both on the military and diplomatic front,” she added.

Authorities in Yerevan say at least 70,500 ethnic Armenians have now crossed into Armenia.

The end of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is a “violent precedent” that may prove inspirational to others, says Artin Dersimonian, a research fellow at the Eurasia Program of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

“The longest-running conflict in post-Soviet Eurasia appears to have been brought to an end by Azerbaijani military force while the so-called international community stood by and merely offered thoughts and prayers,” Dersimonian told Al Jazeera.

“The violent end to this conflict, which all parties had agreed to resolve by peaceful means, is a clear reminder of the relative power vacuum that now exists in the post-Soviet space as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This violent precedent, which has now been clearly set, may continue to prove inspirational elsewhere,” he said.

Armenia has allocated 10 billion drams ($25.6m) to provide assistance to the more than 60,000 ethnic Armenians who have arrived in the country after Baku seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh last week.

The allocation, part of the 2024 budget, was approved on Thursday, the government said in a statement, adding that the sum will be increased if necessary.

“We have tens of thousands of displaced refugees, we must provide them with the necessary primary care, and in the medium term ensure a dignified life in the Republic of Armenia,” read the statement.

Elshad Mirbashir, a MP from the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, cast the victory over Nagorno-Karabakh as Baku reclaiming its “historical justice within its territory, thus safeguarding its sovereignty and national security”.

Azerbaijan has “restored the constitutional structure that [ethnic Armenian] separatists had previously dismantled,” he said, adding the focus is now on signing a peace agreement with Armenia.

“Despite attempts by certain Western nations, both three years ago and in the current year, to halt Azerbaijani military operations, they have subsequently acknowledged that these operations were conducted within Azerbaijan’s own territory,” he said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says Armenians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijani forces retook control of the separatist region have nothing to fear, essentially rejecting Armenia’s claims of ethnic cleansing.

“There is no direct reason for such actions,” Peskov said, referring to the exodus.

“People are nevertheless expressing a desire to leave. … Those who made such a decision should be provided with normal conditions,” he added.

Envoys from Nagorno-Karabakh and Ramin Mammadov, a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, are scheduled to meet in the coming days, Azerbaijan’s APA news agency reports.

The sit-down will take place in Yevlakh, the same Azeri city where a first round of negotiations between the two sides took place after a ceasefire put an end to Baku’s military offensive.

The first meeting focused on tackling the dire humanitarian situation inside the enclave and on guaranteeing rights and security to ethnic Armenians in their integration process into Azerbaijan.

Elkhan Sahinoglu, a political analyst and head of Atlas Center in Baku, says the dismantling of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is “one of the most significant achievements” for Azerbaijan, one that could pave the way for a peace deal with Armenia.

“This can be considered one of the most significant achievements for the people and Azerbaijan since gaining independence,” Sahinoglu told Al Jazeera, arguing that the development will likely speed up construction projects in the region.

Furthermore, the end “of the separatist conflict in Karabakh enhances the prospects of signing a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan”, he said.

“Karabakh had been a political, economic and military burden for Armenia, and now they have relieved themselves of this burden … If Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan follows a logical course, he will sign a peace agreement with Azerbaijan by year end,” Sahinoglu added.