The Armenian government did not organize or attend any ceremonies on the occasion. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian did not comment on the anniversary as he chaired a weekly meeting of his cabinet in Yerevan.
Azerbaijan launched the offensive in Karabakh on September 19, 2023 nearly three years after a ceasefire deal brokered by Russian halted a six-week Armenian-Azerbaijani war. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia. Also, Russian peacekeepers deployed in Karabakh did not try to prevent or stop the offensive.
After 24-hour hostilities, Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s more than 100,000 remaining residents to flee their homeland. Virtually all of them took refuge in Armenia over the next two weeks.
According to Armenia’s Investigative Committee, at least 198 soldiers as well as 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed in the brief but fierce fighting. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the Armenian Foreign Ministry described the exodus as the “final stage of the policy of ethnic cleansing” pursued by Azerbaijan. The statement mentioned “the military attack by Azerbaijan” without explicitly condemning it.
The ministry also stopped short of asserting the Karabakh Armenians’ right to safely return to their homeland. It said instead that Yerevan is seeking the “immediate establishment of peace and relations” with Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry denounced the statement’s reference to “ethnic cleansing” in Karabakh. A ministry spokesman insisted that the Azerbaijani offensive was aimed at “restoring Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
“As a result of the hostilities, our people were forced to leave their homeland, and we will always have in our memories the names of those devotees who defended our homeland at the cost of their lives,” Samvel Shahramanian, the Karabakh president, said at Yerevan’s Yerablur Military Pantheon.
Shahramanian and other Karabakh Armenian leaders attended there a prayer service led by the exiled head of the Artsakh Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Another clergyman, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, who led recent antigovernment protests in Yerevan, as well as representatives of Armenia’s leading opposition groups also visited Yerablur to pay their respects to some of the victims of the September 2023 fighting buried there. They again blamed Pashinian for the fall of Karabakh.
One of the opposition leaders, Ishkhan Saghatelian, said that Pashinian had legitimized Azerbaijan’s “criminal actions” by publicly recognizing Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh several months before the assault.
The Armenian premier has repeatedly indicated over the past year that the Karabakh issue is closed for his administration. One of his top political allies, parliament speaker Alen Simonian, declared earlier this month that Shahramanian and other exiled leaders cannot act as legitimate representatives of the Karabakh Armenians because Karabakh is not a “legal entity” anymore.