Ethnic Armenians cut off by Baku’s advance sense their breakaway state is on the point of collapse
Anna has already survived nine months of a blockade, then a new Azerbaijani offensive that brought shelling and gunfire to her city, and then days hiding in a basement., life in her hometown in Nagorno-Karabakh is a struggle to survive, with shortages of nearly all critical goods, whole families sleeping rough or scrabbling for food after fleeing their villages, and an information vacuum that has separated loved ones and fuelled fears of the worst in towns occupied by Azerbaijan.
Last week, Azerbaijan launched a new offensive, forcing the breakaway republic to agree to disband its territorial defence forces and enter talks that it said would lead to the “reintegration” of Azerbaijani lands. Marut Vanyan, a freelance journalist living in Stepanakert who has chronicled the toll that the war has taken using X , wrote: “Living all my 40 [years] here, I don’t feel this city any more.” With no electricity, he wrote, the city smells of wood smoke as residents go outdoors to cook on open fires. The hospital, where some of the hundreds of war wounded have been treated in overwhelmed wards, was, he wrote, “just horrible”.
“The hunger is quite a serious problem now,” he said. “There are thousands of people. Maybe 15,000 or 20,000 displaced from their villages – some of them occupied, others just risky and dangerous. Mostly they are in Stepanakert in basements and streets, and we have serious problems supplying them with food.”
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