The "frozen" conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh for the first time in 22 years has a real opportunity to turn into a full-scale war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. As a result of the war in the early 90s, about 30 thousand people died, almost a million were refugees. Ruposters presents a selection of rare photographs of inter-ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet Transcaucasus.

The territory of modern Nagorno-Karabakh has been covered since the 4th century BC. was part of the first Armenian kingdom, then - Greater Armenia. After 500 years of being under Arab influence, Karabakh again for a long time (from the 9th to the 18th centuries) became part of the Armenian state formations. In 1813 the territory became part of the Russian Empire.

Khojavend, 1993

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was criticized by all sides of the conflict: both Azerbaijanis (and this despite Gorbachev's statement in July 1990 that "the patience of the Azerbaijani people is not limitless"), and Armenians (local media published "data" about the Turkic origin of the mother of the head of the USSR).

The result of shelling "Grad" of the city of Martakert, 1992

Armenian clergyman

Azerbaijani grandmother and Armenian fighter, 1993

Numerous foreign mercenaries took part in the Karabakh war (1992-1994). Armenia in the war was supported mainly by representatives of the large Armenian diaspora - in particular, fighters from the Dashnaktsutyun party.

Chechen field commanders Basaev, Raduev and Arab Khattab fought on the side of Azerbaijan (an Azerbaijani colonel testifies: “About a hundred Chechen volunteers, led by Shamil Basaev and Salman Raduev, provided invaluable assistance to us. But they, too, were forced to leave the battlefield due to heavy losses and leave"). According to Western sources, Azerbaijan has attracted several hundred Mujahideen from Afghanistan and Turkish Gray Wolves to its side.

106-year-old Armenian woman, Teh village, January 1, 1990

The outbreak of war in Nagorno-Karabakh in the 90s was not the first armed conflict over the disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the 20th century. The largest clashes were in 1918-1921, when Azerbaijan did not recognize the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. It all ended only in 1921, with the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus. Then the disputed territory was attached to the Azerbaijan SSR. Unrest in Karabakh flared up every now and then throughout the Soviet period.​

Losses on both sides during the war of 1992-1994 amounted to approximately 30 thousand people. The Azerbaijani authorities estimated their losses at about 20 thousand people - military and civilian. Another 1 million people are said to have become refugees.

Grape pickers under guard

Cemetery in Stepanakert, 1994

Boy with a toy gun, Stepanakert, 1994

As a result of the war, Nagorno-Karabakh received de facto independence from Azerbaijan. At the same time, the territorial structure of the unrecognized republic is quite specific: almost 14% of the former Azerbaijan SSR fell into the NKR, and at the same time, Azerbaijan still controls 15% of the declared territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijani writers Shikhly and Semedoglu

The events of February 1992 in the city of Khojaly became one of the blackest pages of the war. After the capture of the city by the self-defense forces of the NKR, from 180 (humans rights watch data) to 613 Azerbaijani civilians (according to the Azerbaijani authorities) died. Some sources suggest that these events could become an "act of retaliation" for the Armenian pogroms in Sumgayit (1988) and Baku (1990), the victims of which, according to various estimates, were from several tens to several hundred people.

Going to school, 1992

Stepanakert, 1992

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This publication, like many others, is based on concrete facts, on factual analysis and on the opinion of a professional. In principle, there are many such analyses. But for the sake of the last paragraph, it is worth reading the entire publication, although one can argue with the author’s opinion, for example, in the sense that the Minister of Defense of Armenia has repeatedly said that the intervention of a third party will not be required.

Firstly, the Armenian Defense Army itself is able to solve both the issue of defense and the issue of a productive counteroffensive, which is clearly evidenced by the events of the past day. Secondly, the Armenians are wise and well aware that a third party has its own interests, and this is costly for the simple reason that there is little room for several interests in the small territory of the country.

Let's move on to the results of the political scientist and try to read to the climactic end of the publication.

Preliminary results

By the end of April 2, 2016 - the day that has so far become the bloodiest for the Azerbaijan-Karabakh conflict since 1994 (on May 12, 1994, an open-ended ceasefire agreement signed by representatives of Armenia, Karabakh and Azerbaijan officially entered into force), you can try sum up some of what happened.

The first reports of a large-scale offensive by Azerbaijani troops along almost the entire length of the line of contact between the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army (NKR) and Azerbaijan appeared at about 8 am and were distributed by the press service of the Armenian Defense Ministry.

The Azerbaijani military department for the first time announced what was happening more than 3 hours later, while traditionally shifting all responsibility to the Armenians, who, allegedly, were the first to start shelling Azerbaijani settlements.

All Azerbaijani statements were noticeably devalued by the story of the downed helicopter and drone - at first, Baku denied these losses as best it could, but later, apparently realizing that photos of the destroyed Mi-24 would soon be distributed (and it fell on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh), admitted the loss of the rotorcraft , one tank and 12 military.

The loss of the drone was never acknowledged, although the Armenian Ministry of Defense almost immediately put up several photos of the enemy "spy" - the UAV turned out to be Israeli-made (which confirms that it was from the Azerbaijani Armed Forces - Armenian and Karabakh forces use drones of their own production) of the ThunderB model , with some modifications.

As for the reliability of the given number of dead, it, apparently, does not reflect reality: there are photos from the UAV, which show at least 10 dead Azerbaijani soldiers lying in the neutral zone, three more bodies were captured on one of the videos about what is happening, in addition, three died in a downed helicopter. In total, this is already 16 people.

The Armenian side officially lost 18 people, 35 were wounded. In Azerbaijani sources and groups on social networks, a photograph appeared with only one dead, or rather with his head.

At the moment, the level of intensity of hostilities seems to be falling, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said. However, shortly before this, information appeared from the NKR AO that an Azerbaijani unit with 5 tanks was surrounded and measures were being taken to capture or destroy vehicles. We will find out the reliability of these rumors in the near future.

One thing can be said for sure - Baku's adventurous attempt to take advantage of the surprise factor and seize any significant territories failed.

Several facts testify to the fact that it was the Azerbaijanis who were advancing - the hushing up of what was happening for 3 hours, the presence of a large number of killed Azerbaijani servicemen in the territory of Karabakh and a helicopter that fell on the territory of the NKR. By the way, judging by the photos and videos of the helicopter wreckage, it is very reminiscent of the Mi-24G modification, which is jointly carried out by South Africa and Ukraine (it was supplied earlier to Baku).

The reasons could be very different (or rather, they all work at the same time) - from the desire to increase the rating of the authorities in the event of a fall in prosperity (due to falling oil prices and the devaluation of the manat), to Turkish influence (Ankara would not mind distracting the Russian Federation from Syria to realize their faltering ambitions).

As for the prospects - they are two. The first, and more likely, scenario is that what happened will be the biggest military provocation since 1994. However, such provocations cannot continue indefinitely - over the past two years there have been more than one or two real reasons for starting a full-scale war. The second is the transition to a full-scale war.

This option would be more likely if Azerbaijan would achieve military successes today. Such a scenario would destroy the economies of both countries, take the lives of tens of thousands, and may not even lead to a victory for the parties. This scenario will also be a challenge for the Russian Federation, which has both bilateral agreements with Armenia on mutual assistance and obligations under the CSTO bloc.

It is practically impossible to limit a full-scale war to Karabakh alone - this will give the Armenian troops too much advantage and operational space, so it will be difficult for Moscow to “brush aside” and not interfere in any way.

And here the most interesting thing is that you will have to fight with your own equipment, which the Russian Federation has short-sightedly supplied to Baku in the amount of more than $ 3 billion.

Alexander was detained at the request of Azerbaijan for allegedly "illegal" (according to the Azerbaijani authorities) visit to Nagorno-Karabakh. Personally, I consider this detention a flagrant violation of international law - Azerbaijan could block Alexander from entering the country, but not put him on the international wanted list for such a minor offense, and even more so not initiate criminal articles for his blog posts - this is pure political persecution.

And in this post I will tell you how the events around Nagorno-Karabakh developed in the late eighties and early nineties, we will look at photographs of that war and think about whether there can be any side "right" in the ethnic conflict.

To start, a little history. Nagorno-Karabakh has long been a disputed territory and has repeatedly changed hands over its centuries-old history. Azerbaijani and Armenian scientists are still arguing (and, apparently, they will never come to an agreement) about who originally lived in Karabakh - either the ancestors of modern Armenians, or the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis.

By the 18th century, Nagorno-Karabakh had a predominantly Armenian population, and the territory of Karabakh itself was considered “their own” by both Armenians (due to the fact that the predominantly Armenian population lives in this region) and Azerbaijanis (due to the fact that Nagorno-Karabakh had long been was part of the Azerbaijani territorial formations). This territorial dispute was the main essence of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

At the beginning of the 20th century, military conflicts broke out in Karabakh twice - in 1905-1907 and in 1918-1920 - both conflicts were bloody and accompanied by the destruction of property, and at the end of the 20th century, the Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation flared up with renewed vigor. In 1985, Perestroika began in the USSR, and many problems that had been frozen (and, in fact, not resolved) with the advent of Soviet power, were "reactivated" in the country.

In the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, they recalled that the local authorities in 1920 recognized the right of Karabakh to self-determination, and the Soviet government of Azerbaijan believed that Karabakh should go to Armenia - but the central government of the USSR intervened and "gave" Karabakh to Azerbaijan. In Soviet times, the issue of transferring Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia was raised from time to time by the Armenian leadership, but did not receive support from the center. In the 1960s, socio-economic tension in the NKAO escalated into mass riots several times.

In the second half of the 1980s, calls for the transfer of Karabakh to Armenia began to sound more and more often in Armenia, and in February-March 1988, the idea of ​​transferring Karabakh to Armenia was supported by the official newspaper Soviet Karabakh, which has more than 90,000 subscribers. Then there was a long period of late Soviet confrontation, during which the deputies of Karabakh declared the NKR a part of Armenia, and Azerbaijan opposed this in every possible way.

02. In the winter of 1988, Armenian pogroms took place in Sumgayit and Kirovobad, the central authorities of the USSR decided to hide the true motives of the conflict - the participants in the pogroms were tried for simple "hooliganism", without mentioning the motives of national enmity. Troops were brought into the cities to prevent further pogroms.

03. Soviet troops on the streets of Baku:

04. The conflict is growing, including at the household level, fueled by both Armenian and Azerbaijani media. In the late 1980s, the first refugees appeared - Armenians flee from Azerbaijanis, Azerbaijanis leave Karabakh, mutual hatred only grows.

05. Around the same time, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh begins to develop into a full-fledged military clash. At first, small groups of soldiers from both the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides took part in the fighting - often the soldiers did not have a single uniform and insignia, the troops looked more like some kind of partisan detachments.

06. At the beginning of January 1990, the clashes become more widespread - the first mutual artillery shelling was noted on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. On January 15, a state of emergency was introduced in Karabakh and in the border regions of the Azerbaijan SSR, in the Goris region of the Armenian SSR, as well as in the border zone along the state border of the USSR on the territory of the Azerbaijan SSR.

Children at the gun in one of the artillery positions:

07. Azerbaijani troops, formation for checking by officers. It can be seen that the soldiers are dressed differently - some in urban camouflage, some in the airborne "mabutu" of the Afghan war, and some just in some kind of work jackets. Both sides of the conflict are fought almost exclusively by volunteers.

08. Registration of Azerbaijani volunteers in the troops:

09. What is most terrible is that the military conflict takes place in the immediate vicinity of local cities and villages, almost all segments of the population are drawn into the war - from young children to very old people.

10. Both sides of the conflict perceive the war as "sacred" for themselves, farewell ceremonies for the "heroes who fell during the conflict" gather thousands of people in Baku:

11. In 1991, hostilities intensified - from the end of April to the beginning of June 1991, in Karabakh and the adjacent regions of Azerbaijan, the forces of the units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR and the Soviet Army carried out the so-called operation "Ring", during which another Armenian-Azerbaijani armed clashes.

12. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, both Armenia and Azerbaijan were left with parts of the former Soviet military property. Azerbaijan received the 4th Combined Arms Army (four motorized rifle divisions), three air defense brigades, a special purpose brigade, four air force bases and part of the Caspian Sea Flotilla, as well as many ammunition depots.

Armenia found itself in a worse situation - in 1992, weapons and military equipment of two of the three divisions (15th and 164th) of the 7th Combined Arms Army of the former USSR were transferred under the control of Yerevan. Of course, all this was used in the blazing Karabakh conflict.

13. Active hostilities were conducted in 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994, with "variable success" either by Armenians or by Azerbaijanis.

Azerbaijani soldiers in a school that has become a military base in the front line:

14. Barracks in the former classroom:

15. Armenian troops in one of the villages:

16. Ruins of a house in the city of Shusha.

17. Civilians who died during the conflict...

18. People flee from war:

19. Life in the frontline.

20. Refugee camp in the city of Imishli.

An agreement to end the "hot phase" of the war was reached on May 12, 1994, after which the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh entered a smoldering phase, by fighting in small groups. The military conflict did not bring complete success to any of the warring parties - Nagona Karabakh separated from Azerbaijan, but did not become part of it. Armenia. During the war, about 20,000 people died, the war destroyed several cities in Nagorno-Karabakh and many monuments of Armenian architecture.

In my opinion, there are no "rightists" in the conflict in Karabakh - both sides are to some extent to blame. No "piece of land" in the 21st century is worth the killed people and crippled lives - you need to be able to negotiate and make concessions to each other and open borders, and not build new barriers.

And what do you think, who is right in the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh? Or is there no right there, everyone is to blame?

“There are no moral or historical grounds for recognizing Karabakh as part of the territory of Azerbaijan. In every war, human rights violations are committed on both sides. However, in this case, there is a permanent asymmetry, which allows us to argue that the true aggressor
Azerbaijan is in this war"

Caroline Cox, Vice Speaker of the UK House of Lords
from the debate report on July 1, 1997

“People who do not know the realities of this world make many mistakes”

Heydar Aliyev, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan,
Baku Worker, November 12, 1999

After the failure of the August putsch in 1991, it became clear that the Soviet Union was living out its last months. Under these conditions, many republics of the USSR declared their independence.
On August 30, the Supreme Council of the Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed the restoration of the independence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918-1920. The latter, as you know, was a puppet formation, whose non-recognition by the League of Nations was due precisely to unresolved territorial disputes, including with the Armenian Republic over Nagorno-Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhichevan.
On the contrary, Nagorno-Karabakh declared its independence from the former Azerbaijan SSR in full compliance with the legislation of the USSR. On September 2, the joint session of the deputies of the Regional Council of the NKAO and the District Council of the Shahumyan region proclaimed the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR). On December 10, 1991, a nationwide referendum was held, at which the overwhelming majority of the NKR population voted for independence. This happened before the formal collapse of the USSR, on the basis of Article 3 of the USSR Law "On the procedure for resolving issues related to the withdrawal of a union republic from the USSR" dated April 3, 1990.
On November 26, 1991, the Azerbaijani authorities made another decision - to abolish the NKAR - and proceeded to open aggression against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Having privatized the huge stocks of equipment, weapons and ammunition of the former Soviet army, Baku began direct military operations against the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh.
The war, which began in the fall of 1991, continued with varying success until early May 1994, when an indefinite ceasefire was concluded through the mediation of the Russian Federation. During the war, having lost part of its territories, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic at the same time established control over significant territories of Nagorno-Karabakh and lowland Karabakh outside the borders of the NKR.
This war gave rise to many myths and propaganda clichés, which are deliberately used by the interested forces to distort the idea of ​​the national liberation nature of the struggle of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh for their natural right to live freely on their land. In particular, the consequences of the aggressive war imposed on the Karabakh people by the Republic of Azerbaijan and lost by it are presented by official Baku and its allies as “aggression of Armenia”, occupation of Azerbaijani territories, and so on.

Divorce in the Soviet

As already mentioned in the previous chapter, the USSR Law of April 3, 1990 "On the procedure for resolving issues related to the secession of the union republic from the USSR" gave the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh - that is, the NKAR and the Shaumyan region - a legal opportunity to secede from the AzSSR - the Republic of Azerbaijan in the event of the withdrawal of the latter from the USSR. This is exactly what happened in August-December 1991.
In response to the decision of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan dated August 30, on September 2, 1991, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was proclaimed in Stepanakert. The Declaration on the Proclamation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic stated:
"Joint session of the deputies of the Nagorno-Karabakh regional and Shaumyan district Councils of People's Deputies with the participation of deputies of the Councils of all levels
- expressing the will of the people, confirmed by the actually held referendum and in the decisions of the authorities of the NKAR and the Shahumyan region in 1988-1991, its desire for freedom, independence, equality and good neighborliness;
- stating the proclamation by the Republic of Azerbaijan of “restoration of state independence in 1918-1920”;
- Considering that the policy of apartheid and discrimination pursued in Azerbaijan has created in the republic an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance towards the Armenian people, which has led to armed clashes, human casualties, mass deportation of residents of peaceful Armenian villages;
- based on the current Constitution and the laws of the USSR, which grant the peoples of autonomous formations and densely residing national groups the right to independently resolve the issue of their state-legal status in the event that the union republic secedes from the USSR;
- Considering the desire of the Armenian people for reunification as natural and in line with the norms of international law;
- seeking to restore good neighborly relations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples on the basis of mutual respect for each other's rights;
- taking into account the complexity and inconsistency of the situation in the country, the uncertainty of the fate of the future Union, union structures of power and management;
- respecting and following the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil, Political and Cultural Rights and counting on the understanding and support of the international community
They proclaim: the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic within the boundaries of the current Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region and the adjacent Shahumyan region. NCR for short.
The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic enjoys the powers granted to the republics by the Constitution and legislation of the USSR, and reserves the right to independently determine its state-legal status on the basis of political consultations and negotiations with the leadership of the country and the republics.
On the territory of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic until the adoption of the Constitution and laws of the NKR, the Constitution and legislation of the USSR, as well as other laws currently in force, which do not contradict the goals and principles of this Declaration and the peculiarities of the Republic, are in force” 1 .
Thus, the first step was taken towards the official separation of Nagorno-Karabakh from the former AzSSR on the basis of the current Soviet legislation.
On September 20-23, 1991, the presidents of Russia and Kazakhstan, Boris Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbayev, undertook the first high-level peacekeeping mission in the region, visiting Baku, Stepanakert and Yerevan, where they held talks with the leadership of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the Republic of Armenia.
In many ways, this mission was due to the desire of the two ambitious leaders who rose to their feet to “wipe their noses” at the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. When the motorcade of cars under the protection of the Alpha group taxied to the central square of Stepanakert, where tens of thousands of people had gathered, Yeltsin boldly went out to the people. One of his first words were reproaches against the Soviet president. “Of course, it was necessary for Gorbachev to come here three, almost four years ago. But he didn't come! - the president of the new Russia spoke with his famous dialect, with a trademark smirk. His words found lively support among those gathered on the square, who held banners with greetings to Presidents Yeltsin and Nazarbayev.
On September 23, in the city of Zheleznovodsk in the Russian North Caucasus, negotiations were held with the participation of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Armenia and the leadership of the NKR. As a result, the Zheleznovodsk communiqué was signed - a kind of declaration of the parties' intentions to resolve the conflict.
Characteristically, during the talks in Zheleznovodsk slipped words and remarks that testified in favor of the fact that the Russian and Kazakh presidents set the goal of belittling the weakening Union Center, which was still trying to talk about a new Union Treaty, at the head of the peacekeeping mission.
“The participants in the talks are unanimous that M. Gorbachev should not interfere in the situation,” Izvestia said in a report from the talks. - As you know, a Decree of the President of the USSR is being prepared, in which an attempt will be made once again to resolve the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. According to N. Nazarbayev, "there is no need for this decree, the two independent republics must come to an agreement themselves" 2 . These same words indicated that, at least, President Nazarbayev still continued to consider Nagorno-Karabakh not a subject of negotiations, but an object of a dispute between two "independent republics."
However, the mediation mission ended almost to no avail, since literally a day after the signing of the Zheleznovodsk communique, massive shelling of the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Stepanakert, and direct hostilities began both on the territory and along the perimeter of the borders of the NKR.
Dual power already actually reigned in Nagorno-Karabakh. Local authorities de facto restored their powers. The forces of the commandant's office tried to maintain neutrality, directly dealing with the tasks of delimiting the opposing forces and protecting themselves. In some rural areas, the fighters of the self-defense forces, no longer hidden, moved openly in military uniform with weapons in their hands; internal troops tried not to get involved with them.
On November 20, near the villages of Berdashen (Karakend) of the Martuni region of the NKR, a Mi-8 helicopter crashed, carrying 21 people, including crew members. The helicopter was heading from Azerbaijani Aghdam to the Karabakh regional center of Martuni, where on the eve there were serious clashes between the inhabitants of the city and the suburb of Khojavend, populated by Azerbaijanis, ending in the complete burning of the latter.
Along with three crew members and three officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan, who were part of the observation mission, Major General Nikolai Zhinkin, commandant of the state of emergency area, was among the dead. The leaders of the NKAO law enforcement agencies sent at different times from the center also died: the head of the Internal Affairs Directorate, Major General Sergei Kovalev, the KGB - Sergei Ivanov, the prosecutor Igor Plavsky.
Among the dead was a whole group of high-ranking officials from Baku: Prosecutor General of the Republic of Azerbaijan I. Gaibov (former prosecutor of Sumgayit in 1988), Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan M. Asadov (former secretary of the Shamkhor region of the Azerbaijan SSR, who staged a pogrom in Chardakhlu in 1987), Secretary of State of the Republic of Azerbaijan T. Ismayilov, People's Deputies of the USSR, members of the Organizing Committee for the NKAO V. Jafarov and V. Mamedov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Azerbaijan Z. Hajiyev, Head of the Department of the President's Office of the Republic of Azerbaijan O. Mirzoev. Azerbaijani television correspondents also died.
According to one version, there was a catastrophe, according to another, the helicopter was shot down by the Karabakh self-defense forces. In any case, it became known that before the arrival of internal troops and investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, someone had already visited the site of the helicopter crash: 12 personal weapons of the dead, walkie-talkies, some helicopter instruments and television equipment 3 disappeared.
The investigation was never completed, and the true cause of the death of the helicopter was never established. This event further aggravated the situation in the region.
The former head of the Azerbaijani Organizing Committee Viktor Polyanichko, who became persona non grata in Karabakh, in an attempt to score political points, hysterically spoke from Baku: “This tragedy has become a link in the shaitan chain that binds Azerbaijan. The people of Azerbaijan have survived everything that Satan can send to the earth... Those who brought the two communities to enmity, to bloodshed must answer for the Karabakh tragedy. May they always be haunted, like a punishment, by the vision of a monstrous tragedy committed by them near the Black Village (the name "Karakend" is translated from Azerbaijani as the Black Village, - author's note) ... Allah sees and knows everything! God knows and sees everything! four
The supplies of transit Russian gas to the Republic of Armenia were finally blocked by the Azerbaijani side. From November 22, the Yevlakh-Stepankert railway was blocked, along which freight trains had occasionally come and gone before.
On November 26, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan adopted the above-mentioned decision to abolish the NKAO. The USSR was on the verge of collapse, and the policy of "obedience" to the once mighty Center was discarded as unnecessary.
In response, the session of the Council of People's Deputies of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, held on November 27 in Stepanakert, approved the date for holding a referendum on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh and adopted a temporary regulation on elections to the NKR Supreme Council.
By this time, hostilities were already underway both along the borders and in a significant part of the territory of the NKR itself. Under these conditions, a referendum was held on December 10, which asked the following question: “Do you agree that the proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic be an independent state, independently determining the forms of cooperation with other states and communities?”
The referendum was monitored by a group of independent observers, among whom were people's deputies of the USSR, the RSFSR, the Moscow and Leningrad Soviets, representatives of the Memorial society, other Russian, Armenian and Ukrainian human rights and public organizations and movements. They were accompanied by Russian television journalists, television correspondents from the United States, Bulgaria, correspondents of Radio Russia, Ekho Moskvy, Izvestia, Moscow News, Megapolis Express, Stolitsa, Panorama, Literary Gazette”, “Cotidienne de Paris”, France-Presse news agency, a number of other publications and agencies.
The Act on the results of the referendum, signed by independent observers, stated that 108,736 people, or 82.2% of the number of registered voters, took part in the referendum. The overwhelming majority of those who did not take part in the voting are residents of Azerbaijani settlements.
Of those who took part in the vote, 108,615 or 99.89% said "yes" to independence. Given all the previous events in Nagorno-Karabakh, this result did not look like something surprising. Only on the voting day itself, according to observers, ten people from Karabakh were killed and eleven were wounded from shelling.
On December 28, 1991, elections to the NKR Supreme Council were held. The elections were held according to the majoritarian system, 75 deputies were elected.
On January 6, 1992, the NKR Supreme Council adopted the Declaration on State Independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. In particular, the Declaration stated:
“Based on the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination, based on the will of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, expressed through the Republican referendum held on December 10, 1991;
- realizing the responsibility for the fate of the historical Motherland;
- confirming fidelity to the principles of the Declaration on the proclamation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic of September 2, 1991;
- seeking to normalize relations between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples;
- desiring to protect the population of the NKR from aggression and the threat of physical destruction;
- developing the experience of independent people's self-government of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1918-1920;
- expressing readiness to establish equal and mutually beneficial relations with all states and commonwealths of states;
- respecting and following the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the final document of the Vienna meeting of the countries participating in the European Conference on Security and Cooperation, and other generally recognized norms of international law,
The Supreme Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic approves the independent statehood of the NKR.”
Further, the Declaration listed the basic principles and norms on which the young republic was to be built. Including the fact that "the basis for the creation of the Constitution and legislation of the NKR are the present Declaration and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" 5 .
On January 8, 33-year-old candidate of historical sciences Artur Mkrtchyan was elected the first chairman of the NKR Supreme Council.
Thus, in the expanses of the former Soviet Union, a new state was proclaimed with a territory of 5 thousand km 2 and a population of approximately 210 thousand people. Of these, the vast majority were Armenians, about 40 thousand - Azerbaijanis and Kurds, about one and a half thousand - Russians and representatives of other nationalities.
Over the following years, official Baku and its allies could not come up with a single serious argument against the irreproachable, from the point of view of international law, formation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, except for one false and obviously untenable one.
“During the existence of the USSR, not a single union republic, including Azerbaijan and Armenia, took advantage of the withdrawal procedure provided for in the Law,” writes Tofik Musayev, first-class adviser to the diplomatic service of the Republic of Azerbaijan, in the article “Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict: from claims to military occupation » 6 .
A similar assessment is given by the well-known International Crisis Group - ICG, supposedly an independent expert organization that actually lobbies for US-British interests (according to a "strange coincidence", the seat of the ICG is Brussels, where NATO headquarters is located). The report of the ICG dated September 14, 2005, entitled "Nagorno-Karabakh: a look at the conflict from the scene", in particular, stated: "Azerbaijani authorities believe that the reference to this law is groundless, since not a single union republic, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, did not use this procedure for secession, stipulated in the law.”
Meanwhile, it was the Republic of Armenia that became the only republic of the USSR that seceded from the Union in full accordance with the USSR Law of April 3, 1990, ignoring the referendum on the preservation of the USSR on March 17, 1991 and at the same time announcing the upcoming referendum on independence, which was held on September 21 of the same year. In the same way, the NKAO became the only former Soviet autonomy that exercised its right to self-determination in strict accordance with this Law of the USSR.
Incidentally, the authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan asserted later that on December 31, 1991, a referendum on independence was allegedly held in this republic, in which 99 percent of the population voted for independence. Six months earlier, the same figure in favor of preserving the USSR was given in the former AzSSR by a referendum that actually took place on March 17, 1991.
Until the official collapse of the Soviet Union, no one had ever legally repealed the USSR Law of April 3, 1990. The same circumstance that other republics gained independence due to the collapse of the USSR - a foregone conclusion by the December decision of the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in Belovezhskaya Pushcha - could not at all mean the legal illegitimacy of the previous actions of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic to exercise its legal right to stage the question of their own state-legal status.
Simplifying, one can recall the inscription that met a Soviet person in every police station: "Ignorance of the law does not exempt from responsibility for its violation." Or, to put it more simply, "the law is written for everyone." And knowledge, but non-fulfillment of the law by some subjects, even if by the majority, all the more cannot cancel the legitimacy of the fulfillment of the same law by other (other) subjects.
Therefore, it is not clear by what logic the opponents of the right to exercise the right to self-determination by the Armenian people of Nagorno-Karabakh believed and continue to believe that the failure by the overwhelming majority of the Union Republics of the USSR to comply with the norms of the legislation in force during the collapse of the USSR "cancels" the legality of the acquisition of independence by the NKR in full accordance with this very legislation.
By the way, it is precisely the fact that the collapse of the USSR was accomplished in defiance of the law - which the opponents of the Belovezhskaya Agreement have repeatedly rightly said - is the reason for the poorly hidden irritation caused in many capitals of the CIS at the mention of the USSR Law of April 3, 1990. It is obvious that such a position has absolutely nothing to do with the legal approach.
On the other hand, the Law of April 3, 1990 was vividly remembered during the period of Georgian aggression against the people of South Ossetia in August 2008. It was on the basis of this Law that at the meetings of the State Duma and the Federation Council of the Russian Federation it was announced retroactively that Georgia was not competent to decide the fate of its former autonomies in 1991. In fact, the USSR Law of April 3, 1990 became the legal basis for the recognition by the Russian Federation of the state independence of the Republic of South Ossetia and the Republic of Abkhazia on August 26, 2008 ...
Meanwhile, at the end of November 1991, events developed like an avalanche. On November 26, the Supreme Council of the Azerbaijan Republic adopted a law abolishing the NKAO, which for some reason was published in the Azerbaijani press only at the beginning of January 1992 7 .
As Tofik Musaev believes in the article “Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict: from claims to military occupation” mentioned above, “until the full restoration of the state independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan and its recognition by the international community, Nagorno-Karabakh continued to be part of Azerbaijan, and actions aimed at unilateral secession this region had no legal consequences” 8 .
On the page above, T. Musaev, trying to prove that by September 1991 the USSR Law of April 3, 1990 had lost its "relevance and legal force", refers to the documents of the last governing body of the Soviet Union - the State Council of the USSR, whose decisions "September 6, 1991 were the recognition of the independence of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia was formalized” 9 .
But here, too, Mr. Musaev hits the sky with his finger. He, apparently, does not know, or he deliberately "withholds" from the reader the reaction of the same State Council of the USSR to the legislative act on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan on November 26, 1991
Namely, on the second day after the adoption of the decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Azerbaijan on November 26, by the Decree of November 28, 1991, the State Council of the USSR recognized the law of the Azerbaijan Republic on the abolition of the NKAR as unconstitutional, which automatically meant the deprivation of this law of any legal force 10 .
The resolution of the State Council was called “On Measures to Stabilize the Situation in the NKAO and the Border Regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia”, that is, its very title contained the rejection of Baku’s unilateral anti-constitutional actions.
However, not a single act relating to the proclamation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the holding of a nationwide referendum on its state-legal status, adopted in the fall of 1991 in the NKAR-NKR, was canceled or recognized as illegal by the same State Council of the USSR 11 .
But before the collapse of the USSR, the State Council had more than enough time to consider and give a negative assessment of at least the same Declaration on the proclamation of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic of September 2, 1991, adopted by the joint session of the Regional Council of the NKAR and the district council of the Shaumyan region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The first ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Armenia, Vladimir Stupishin, rightly noted in his book “My Mission to Armenia”: “But by what right does Baku deny its (Nagorno-Karabakh - author's note) status, recognized by the same constitutional system that gave birth to Azerbaijan SSR? According to Soviet state law, an autonomous region is a national-state formation with its own territory, the integrity of which must also be respected. Moreover, the qualities of a subject of a large federation were also recognized for autonomous formations: they were directly represented in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and not through those union republics into which they were squeezed, as a rule, against their will.
... Realizing the weakness of their argumentation and the complete absence of any legal basis under it, the opponents of the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic are also emphasizing another argument from the arsenal of Azerbaijani propaganda: the local Azerbaijanis did not participate in the referendum on December 10, 1991, therefore, that he is illegitimate.
However, it is known that the authorities of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic officially invited the Azerbaijani national minority to take part in the referendum and even sent, through the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the SSR, voting ballots, printed in the Azerbaijani language, to the Azerbaijani settlements of the NKR.
However, the Karabakh Azerbaijanis actually became hostages of the Baku authorities, who forbade them to participate in the referendum. In addition, the prolonged incitement of interethnic hatred by the Azerbaijani authorities, the course of Operation Ring and the start of actual hostilities gave rise to the illusion among many local Azerbaijanis that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh would be finished very soon. This deplorable fact also cannot be discounted.
In the already mentioned report of the ICG dated September 14, 2005, in an attempt to convince the international community that the 1991 referendum in the NKR is not legitimate, the compilers of the ICG report initially even resorted to outright overexposure.
Thus, in the original version of the above-mentioned report, incorrect data were given on the national composition of the population of the NKAR: the number of Azerbaijanis was overestimated from 21.5% according to the official data of the 1989 USSR population census to 25.3%. It also said about the referendum on December 10, 1991: “... approximately 108,615 people voted for the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. Only a few (none) of the 47,400 Azerbaijani residents participated in the referendum.”
Thus, firstly, the size of the Azerbaijani population of the NKR was again overestimated; and the number of Armenian voters was opposed not by the number of Azerbaijani voters, but by the total (and, moreover, overestimated) number of Azerbaijani residents of the NKR, taking into account minor children who did not have the right to vote.
In fact, according to the data of the NKR CEC, the number of voters of Azerbaijani nationality was 26.4 thousand people, which was slightly less than 20% of the total number of voters. A cursory glance at the ICG data taken from the ceiling gave a figure of 30.4% of voters of this nationality! As they say, feel the difference.
In 1988, the percentage of Armenian voters in the total population of the city of Baku was no less than the percentage of Azerbaijani voters in the NKR, but today the same ICG does not at all try to cast doubt on the results of elections and referendums held over the past years in the Azerbaijani capital.
Here, as in many other cases, there is an obvious double standard, so inherent in the coverage of virtually any aspect of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh, or, in the terminology of the OSCE, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Arm yourself who can!

By the end of September 1991, it became clear that the Soviet army and internal troops could no longer be so unequivocally a foreign legion in the service of Baku. Yes, in the Republic of Azerbaijan there was almost 12,000 riot police, but its effectiveness on the eve of a big war was highly questionable.
So, in the same September, the Karabakh self-defense forces stormed the positions of OMON on a mountain plateau in the Shahumyan region and, with minimal losses, recaptured the villages of Erkech, Manashid and Buzlukh, deported with the help of the Soviet army in July, from the forces of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Internal Affairs. Moreover, the losses of the defending riot policemen were significantly higher than those of the Karabakhians advancing from below; and on the abandoned positions they abandoned artillery pieces and heavy machine guns.
However, Baku had a large reserve in the form of units of the 4th Army, which gradually became national in 1990-1991.
If in the Armenian SSR conscription into the army in 1990-1991. were practically frustrated due to the unwillingness of the republican authorities to send conscripts to the vast "common house", and the central authorities - to contribute to the creation of a base of national troops - then in the AzSSR-AR the situation was different.
As noted earlier, A. Mutalibov, loyal to the Kremlin, was given the green light to slowly but surely create his own army. Back in 1990, the USSR Ministry of Defense allowed over 60 percent of conscripts recruited in the republic to remain on the territory of Azerbaijan (traditionally, no more than 10-15 percent of local conscripts remained in the republics).
In addition, although the official participation of the army in the conflict on the side of Baku became formally impossible, the practice of "informal" participation in hostilities for appropriate remuneration has become widespread.
At the same time, the authorities of the Azerbaijan Republic accelerated the process of forcible expropriation of weapons, which, already in October-November 1991 (when the "new" authorities were frightened after the failure of the putsch openly supported by Ayaz Mutalibov), sometimes began to take the form of unbridled robbery. Murders, hostage-taking and attacks on military personnel with the aim of seizing weapons, property, equipment and ammunition of the 4th Army have become more frequent.
If in the Republic of Armenia (RA) the peak of attacks on military warehouses or facilities fell on 1990 - early 1991, and by the end of 1991 - early 1992. Since there were significantly fewer such attacks, in the Republic of Azerbaijan (AR) the number of attacks on the military during this period grew like an avalanche.
Thus, according to the statistics of the headquarters of the Transcaucasian Military District, only in the first five months of 1992 in the Republic of Azerbaijan there were twice as many attacks on the army as in the whole of 1991 - 98 and 43, respectively. As a result, according to the same data, in five months of 1992, 3,939 weapons were stolen in the AR against 73 in the Republic of Armenia 13 .
As a result of more than 100 attacks on military units and warehouses from October 1991 to June 1992, dozens of tanks, AFVs (armored fighting vehicles - BMP, BTR, BRDM, etc.), artillery, missile systems were captured in the Republic of Azerbaijan and installations "Grad", two combat helicopters MI-24, jet attack aircraft SU-25; the largest regional ammunition depot in the ZakVO in Aghdam and a number of other depots; several military bases and units.
Meanwhile, in the course of this “privatization” of unprecedented scale, accompanied by dozens of killed, wounded and taken hostage military personnel, the military press services continued to draw public attention primarily to cases of attacks that took place in the Republic of Armenia, incomparable to any other. in terms of the number of weapons seized, nor in terms of its implications for the military balance in the region.
So, for example, the hijacking in May 1992 of two helicopters from a military base at the Yerevan Erebuni airport, which ended with the return of helicopters to the military without shooting or casualties, was given much more attention than the capture by the Azerbaijani national army of the air defense brigade control center near the city of Mingachevir, - with the dispersal of personnel and the capture of hostages.
The capture by the emerging Azerbaijani army of the largest district ammunition depot in the Transcaucasus near the city of Agdam on February 23, 1992, which had dramatic consequences for the further escalation of violence in the region, was practically not covered. But in this warehouse there were 728 wagons of artillery, 245 wagons of rockets and 131 wagons of ammunition for small arms: a total of 1104 wagons of ammunition! This amount of the Azerbaijani army was more than enough for several years of hostilities.
According to the Decree of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the ZakVO troops were declared under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation. However, the authorities of the Transcaucasian republics also took steps to speed up the transfer of weapons from the armies stationed on their territories. So, back in December 1991, the President of the Azerbaijan Republic, A. Mutalibov, issued a Decree on the transfer of military units and formations on the territory of the former AzSSR under his control. And in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic in January 1992, Heydar Aliyev, who returned to the republic in the summer of 1990, declared that the military must obey the Supreme Majlis of the NAR and cannot take anything out of the republic except personal belongings.
At the beginning of 1992, agreements were reached between Russia and the republics of Transcaucasia on the transfer to the Ministries of Defense of the new states of part of the equipment and weapons stationed on their territories of the former Soviet armies on a parity basis. However, in reality, no parity was achieved, and the weapons themselves were not transferred at all at the same time. Baku was the first to receive weapons, and received them in much greater quantities than Yerevan and Tbilisi combined.
The process of official transfer of weapons to the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan was launched on February 19, 1992 during a visit to Baku by Colonel-General B. Gromov and Fleet Admiral V. Chernavin. Then a helicopter squadron and some rear units were transferred to the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and a preliminary agreement was reached on the division of the Caspian flotilla. The transfer process basically ended in May-early June 1992, however, some parts were transferred later (for example, on August 6, 1992, an artillery regiment in the city of Port-Ilyich in the Caspian Sea was transferred to the Azerbaijani side).
Only officially, in accordance with the directive of the Russian Ministry of Defense N 314/3/022В of June 22, 1992, Russia declared in June 1992 the transfer of 237 tanks, about 630 AFVs, 175 artillery systems, 130 mortars, 33 BM-21 installations to the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan "Grad" and about 2000 machine guns 14 .
Baku received from the Russian army and captured from it 130 combat and training aircraft. Among them were Su-25 attack aircraft, Su-24 front-line bombers, MIG fighters and high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, Czechoslovak L-29, L-39 (the latter were easily converted into light attack aircraft capable of carrying bombs, unguided rockets, aircraft cannons and machine guns). This fact was acknowledged by the Russian parliamentarians during their visit to Armenia in November 1992 15 .
Not a single combat aircraft was handed over to Yerevan, since they were not based on the territory of the republic.
On November 6, 1993, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan sent letter No. 175 to the delegations of the states parties to the Treaty on the Limitation of Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), in which it informed that “in July-August 1992, the Russian Federation transferred , and the Republic of Azerbaijan has taken under its jurisdiction the following number of weapons and equipment limited by the Treaty:

• battle tanks - 286 units,
• armored combat vehicles - 842 units,
• artillery systems - 346 units,
• combat aircraft - 53 units,
• attack helicopters - 8 units

In May 1993, the Republic of Azerbaijan received from the Russian Federation 105 units of armored combat vehicles and 42 units of artillery systems.
Summing up the above data of the Directive of the Russian Ministry of Defense dated June 22, 1992 and the data on the “expropriated” weapons by force, one can easily make sure that almost all the equipment and weapons of the 5 divisions of the former Soviet army passed to the Azerbaijan National Army. In 1992 - four divisions of the 4th Army: the 23rd, 295th, 60th Motorized Rifle Divisions (motorized rifle divisions), stationed in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic of the 75th Motorized Rifle Division, and a little later, in 1993, the 104th airborne division stationed in Ganja (Kirovabad).
To this we must add 40% of the ships and vessels of the Caspian military flotilla with the entire coastal infrastructure, parts of the air defense army stationed in the republic, military airfields, and so on.
The transfer of equipment and weapons to the Republic of Armenia of two divisions of the 7th Army - Yerevan and Kirovakan - began at the end of June 1992 and ended in July of the same year. From military aviation, the RA received a helicopter squadron based at Erebuni Airport, on the outskirts of Yerevan; several air defense units were also transferred.
On the basis of the Leninakan division of the 7th Army and a number of separate units, a formation of Russian troops was created in the Republic of Armenia. In the summer of 1992, the Russian-Armenian Treaty “On the Status of Russian Troops in Armenia” was prepared and signed in the autumn, which determined the legal status of these troops in the republic, as well as the fact that these troops defend the land and air borders of the former USSR in Armenia - that is, the borders of the Republic of Armenia with Turkey and Iran.
After the division of military property, the air defense troops remained Russian in Transcaucasia - in fact, partially. However, in the Republic of Armenia, for example, at that time they were only 30 percent complete, 16 which did not even allow covering the external borders of the CIS, and in the Republic of Azerbaijan, many air defense units were captured by the national army.
All the processes described above were hidden from the general Russian public under the camouflage of a very intricate and ideologically dissected propaganda of the military press services; so it was almost impossible for a person who did not specifically follow the events in Transcaucasia to figure out what was what. Last but not least, this was probably done to hide the obviously not disinterested fact of the transfer of a huge amount of weapons to the Baku regime, which unexpectedly had more weapons at its disposal than many NATO countries.
Taking into account the war launched by Baku to destroy the Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh and the aggressive actions against the Republic of Armenia, the transfer of such a number of weapons by the Russian military department to the belligerent country did not comply not only with the CIS treaties, but also with the obligations assumed by the leadership of the Russian Federation as a permanent member of the UN Security Council .
As a result of these injections, military parity in the region was sharply disrupted; this, as well as the earlier transfer of weapons to the AR, allowed the Azerbaijani side to conduct a large-scale offensive in June-August 1992 against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic proclaimed after the collapse of the USSR and capture the Shaumyan and most of the Mardakert regions of the NKR.
But what about Nagorno-Karabakh?
It was curious what was emphasized in 1991-1992. the attention of all mass media, without exception, to the fate of the 366th motorized rifle (framed, that is, incomplete) regiment of the 23rd division stationed until March 1992 in Stepanakert. When trying to withdraw the regiment, a large group of officers and ensigns did not allow to take out about one third of the regimental equipment and weapons, which were transferred to the armament of the self-defense forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. It came to armed clashes with paratroopers from the 104th division (stationed in Kirovabad-Ganja), who arrived to take out equipment, and the latter retreated.
Among this group of servicemen were not only Armenians, but also Russians, Ukrainians, representatives of other nationalities. In the Russian Ministry of Defense, all of them were then branded as "traitors". Meanwhile, these people lived and served in Stepanakert for many years, and during the period of massive shelling of the city, their wives and children hid for months in damp, cold basements, like all the rest of Stepanakert. And the servicemen themselves were forced to run from home to the location of the regiment, which was also under shelling from Shusha, and every minute to think: what about the families there now?
And what should a decent person do after 5 months of this nightmare: take their families out and, waving goodbye to their neighbors, leave the region being shot with all their equipment? Or do it the way the "traitors" did: having evacuated, who could have families, stay to fulfill the duty of defending the population not in words, but in deeds?
But even after this replenishment, the arsenal of the Karabakh people, in comparison with the forces of the advancing enemy from everywhere, was insignificant. Suffice it to say that they got only from the 366th regiment ... 2 serviceable, on the move, T-72 tanks, two or three dozen BMP-1 and BMP-2, 3 anti-aircraft self-propelled guns (ZSU-23-4) "Shilka" , a number of lightly armored tractors (MTLB) and engineering vehicles.
Recall that until May 1992, the NKR was blocked from all sides by the Azerbaijani army, so the Karabakh people had to start the war practically with guns and machine guns in their hands. After all, it is impossible in principle to deliver heavy equipment - infantry fighting vehicles, especially a tank, by helicopters, even transport Mi-26s, which were available only to the military.
The other part of the equipment of the 366th regiment was nevertheless taken out by the units of the Airborne Forces, put out of action by them on the spot, or was destroyed earlier - during the shelling of Stepanakert by Azerbaijani "Grad" installations from Shusha in February 1992.
Attention was artificially drawn to this problem, although it is quite obvious that the former NKAR was a subject of the Union under the Soviet Constitution and had the right to its part of the armaments, especially in the conditions of an armed attack on it.
At the same time, the reaction of the leadership of the former Soviet army to the fact that the weapons of the 75th division, which was located in the enclave of Nakhichevan, was transferred without any problems to the local leadership headed by Heydar Aliyev was completely calm. Moreover, even before the departure of the personnel of the 75th division from Nakhichevan, the press spoke of its transfer as something already decided: “We are in a confined space and the latest statements by P. Grachev and A. Rutskoy about the immediate withdrawal of equipment for this regions are unacceptable. Here there can be only one solution - to transfer the equipment, military camps, property to the legitimate authorities,” said the deputy commander of the 75th division, V. Markelov 17 .
As the Azerbaijani army received more and more weapons, the escalation of hostilities in the region became more and more palpable.

War

Since September 25, from Shushi and from the side of the Azerbaijani villages surrounding Stepanakert and located on the heights of the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh began to be shelled from Alazan anti-hail rocket launchers, artillery pieces, and small arms. Soon the shelling became regular; they also intensified as more and more deadly weapons were brought to the Azerbaijani settlements that surrounded Stepanakert during the years of "socialist internationalism"
The Karabakh Armenians soon began to respond with shelling of Shusha from the wooded mountains located a couple of kilometers from the opposite side of the Shusha gorge, first with Alazan rockets, and later with artillery pieces. However, the positions of the parties were not comparable.
Shusha, which is only 6 kilometers from Stepanakert in a straight line, is on average 600 meters higher in height. And the ledges of the Shusha plateau, closest to the capital of the NKR, hang over Stepanakert from a bird's eye view, 2-3 kilometers from the city center. That is, during the shelling of Stepanakert from Shushi, it was practically not necessary to aim: let the rockets and shells direct fire, they would still fall on a house or street.
From the village of Malybeyli, adjacent to the outskirts of Stepanakert, from the north-east, they hit with direct fire from Rapira anti-tank guns, which pierced through the 5-story buildings of the outlying city block, fired machine-gun fire.
From the highest, southwestern outskirts of Stepanakert, from the village of Kirkidzhan, predominantly populated by Azerbaijanis, they fired from automatic weapons at the adjacent quarters of the city. There were cases when bullets from a sniper rifle already at the end found their victim in the very center of the city, at a distance of more than 2 kilometers from the village.
Kirkidzhan itself, located on the slopes of a mountain range, was turned into a serious defensive position. Under the patronage of the Organizing Committee, in a year and a half, numerous concrete pillboxes, positions, fortified basements were erected in the village, passages and communications were dug.
Suffice it to say that the companies and platoons of militia that began to form in Stepanakert fought for the mastery of this urban suburb from the end of December 1991 to January 22, 1992. Fights were sometimes fought for days for individual houses and even buildings.
In October, self-defense forces carried out operations to return the Armenian villages of the Hadrut region deported in May-June. And on October 31, an unexpected blow knocked out the OMON garrison from the large village of Tog with a mixed population. All the Azerbaijani villagers, among whom, however, almost half were local Armenians who had been Islamized two centuries ago, left the village along with the retreating riot police.
By mid-December 1991, the internal troops, whose number in the NKAR had been gradually reduced over the previous few months, not only did not control anything, but even with difficulty protected themselves. On December 22, in Stepanakert, the commandant's office vehicle, which did not stop at the direction of the post of the Karabakh self-defense forces, was fired upon, a serviceman died. The situation has become a mirror of the one that was under the previous regime. By that time, the internal troops were already in full swing preparing for the complete withdrawal from the state of emergency.
The telegram sent by the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the NKR and the People's Deputies of the SSR from Nagorno-Karabakh to the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, it was said that, despite all the assurances that the internal troops would leave the region only after ensuring the security of its population, in fact, these troops are being withdrawn , and their weapons are transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Therefore, the leaders of the self-defense forces could not let them go just like that, with all their weapons. On December 23, an armed unit of the Karabakh people was blocked in the place of its deployment, while eating in the canteen, the personnel of the regiment of internal troops. The operation passed without casualties, and the regiment freely left the region. The Karabakh militias got about a thousand Kalashnikov assault rifles, several dozen machine guns, sniper rifles and pistols, a dozen armored personnel carriers and armored personnel carriers, trucks, several mobile radio stations, etc.
By the way, the correctness of the decision of the Karabakh people is evidenced by a slightly later event in another "hot spot" in Transcaucasia - South Ossetia. “On April 25, 1992, the Russian contingent of internal troops, located in the building of a former camp site on the outskirts of Tskhinval, left South Ossetia for Georgia under cover of night, taking weapons and equipment with them and leaving the residents of the capital of South Ossetia face to face with obviously superior in strength and numbers by an enemy who did not hide his goal - to wipe the self-determined republic off the face of the earth. This act was sharply perceived by the population of the republic, which regarded the withdrawal of internal troops as an act of betrayal on the part of the “Yeltsin-Kozyrevka” leadership” 18 .
However, as before in Nagorno-Karabakh, the defenders of South Ossetia “made an irrational decision: to fight to the death, no matter what. From the point of view of common sense, this decision seemed absurd, because it doomed the few and poorly armed self-defense units to an early destruction, and therefore, obviously, no one expected or miscalculated. In the subsequent escalation of the conflict, dozens of people were killed and maimed every day during rocket and artillery shelling of Tskhinval... But the republic survived at the cost of huge casualties” 19 .
As you can see, the situations in which we found ourselves at the beginning of hostilities in 1991-1992. Stepanakert and Tskhinval were almost identical. Obviously, it would have been much easier for the Ossetians if at least part of the arsenal of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation had remained in place, and had not been withdrawn along with the troops. That is, in December 1991, the people of Karabakh acted quite logically and predictably.
The weapons taken from the regiment of internal troops became the first relatively large arsenal, which allowed the emerging self-defense forces of the NKR to begin operations to unblock Stepanakert by establishing control over the Azerbaijani villages surrounding the city, turned into real firing points.
Naturally, weapons also came from Yerevan by helicopters, which, as a rule, took off from the shore of Lake Sevan in the predawn twilight and at the very dawn of dawn quickly overcame the mountain slums of Kelbajar, bristling with machine guns extended from the windows.
At the end of December 1991, the last representatives of the commandant's office of the state of emergency, accompanied by special forces of internal troops, finally left the territory of the NKR.
When local journalists entered the building, which served as a refuge for the Organizing Committee and the military commandant's office for almost two years, they saw the premises completely polluted in the truest sense of the word. Feces lay on the floor, tables, chairs and carpets, were smeared on the walls and windows. The same picture appeared earlier to the fighters of the self-defense forces in the school of the Shaumyan regional center immediately after the departure of the garrison of the internal troops of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. The parting of the "law enforcement forces" with fellow citizens was not very cordial...
Meanwhile, shelling of towns and villages in the NKR became more and more frequent and fierce. On January 13, the Azerbaijani army for the first time used the BM-21 Grad multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) against civilians, a weapon of mass destruction whose use against populated areas is prohibited by international conventions. As a result of the shelling of the regional center of Shaumyan, five people were killed and more than ten people were injured, dozens of residential buildings were destroyed and damaged.
Exactly one month later, on February 13, the Azerbaijani armed forces began regular shelling from the Grads of the capital of the NKR. As new installations were delivered, Stepanakert was shelled with Grads not only from Shusha, but also from Khojaly and the Azerbaijani villages of Jangasan, Kesalar, Malibeyli surrounding the capital of the NKR.
55,000-strong Stepanakert has turned into a systematically destroyed ghost town. The population hid in the cellars, only occasionally going up to their apartments. But many private houses had no basements at all. And the existing basements of private properties, unlike the concrete basements of apartment buildings, could not serve as a serious shelter in the event of a direct hit by a two-meter Grad projectile on a residential building.
In winter, in the cold, there was neither heat nor electricity in the city. The only thing that saved us was gas, which the Azerbaijani side did not turn off for the simple reason that it was supplied through Stepanakert to the high-mountainous Shusha, where the winter is more severe.
Overcrowding in basements, cold and stress contributed to the spread of diseases. In the absence of electricity, water was not supplied to the houses at all. And in the intervals between shelling, the townspeople stood in queues to a few springs, and when the shelling resumed, they scattered to shelters. To keep their place in line they often left their buckets where they were; The photographs taken by correspondents of "queues" of empty buckets have become a gloomy symbol of the besieged Stepanakert.
Journalists and intermediaries who visited the Karabakh capital during those terrible months compared Stepanakert with the besieged Leningrad of 1941-1943. Only the Germans stood much further from the city on the Neva, while Stepanakert, lying in full view at the feet of the Azerbaijani military, was destroyed in cold blood by aimless shooting at the squares from the Grad installations.
There were days when up to 200 Grad shells alone fell on the city. On such days, the number of dead and wounded numbered in the dozens. Operations in the hospital were done in basements under the light provided by diesel generators. Fuel was dispensed in buckets. Women in labor gave birth in the basement of the former executive committee, where a temporary delivery center was organized: the city maternity hospital and hospital were destroyed by direct hits from multiple launch rocket systems.
The Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords of Great Britain, Baroness Caroline Cox, visited Nagorno-Karabakh for the first time in the summer of 1991, during Operation Koltso, as part of the international delegation of the human rights congress in memory of academician A. Sakharov. Imbued with compassion for the people of Karabakh, she again and again returned to the mountainous region, bringing humanitarian aid and telling the world about the tragedy taking place in the region. And after the war, she launched a whole program of humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation of the victims. To date, Cox has already visited the NKR more than 60 times, where everyone knows her, from young to old. Here is how she described the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in March 1992 in an interview with the Russian Thought newspaper under the telling headline "This part of the world has turned into a living hell."
“In March, we again went to Nagorno-Karabakh and were convinced that not only is there no improvement in the situation, but, on the contrary, it has deteriorated catastrophically. It seems to me that nowadays there is hardly any other place in the world where people are in such truly hellish conditions. The greatest number of victims is among the civilian population. Several times they announced that they had agreed on a ceasefire, and each time the Azerbaijani side violated the agreement and started shelling from Grad installations. These attacks in most cases do not pursue any strategic goals; it is simply the destruction of life. People die, and their relatives cannot even bury them properly, according to their traditions; animals are killed or they die of wounds or starvation; cities and villages are leveled to the ground” 20 .
There was only one way out: to break the blockade ring and destroy the firing points. First of all, around the capital of the NKR, which was done in the winter-spring of 1992.
Detachments of the self-defense forces alternately occupied the villages of Jamilla, Malibeyli and Khojaly of the Askeran region. During the capture of Khojaly on March 26, 1992, the Stepanakert airport was unblocked, and planes from Yerevan began to land there. However, only a few flights were made, because from the side of Agdam the airport soon began to be fired from "Grads", and one Yak-40, standing on the runway, fortunately without passengers, was destroyed by fire from the Azerbaijani side.
Quite a few civilians remained in Khojaly who did not have time to leave, who were subsequently exchanged for Armenian hostages and simply transferred to the Azerbaijani side. During the assault itself, there were few civilian casualties. Hundreds of people successfully retreated along the corridor through the valley of the Karkar River towards Aghdam. However, it was there, near the Azerbaijani positions, that a tragedy occurred: several dozen civilians from among the retreating were shot in cold blood, the corpses of some were then disfigured. It happened on neutral territory, and even then not only the Karabakh people, but also some Azerbaijanis directly expressed the idea of ​​a deliberate provocation.
After a decade and a half, this tragedy has acquired unthinkable details and is being put forward in Baku as the main evidence of the cruelty of the Armenian side. We will return to this topic below.
On May 8-9, as a result of a carefully prepared assault, in the course of stubborn battles, the Karabakh self-defense units captured the fortified positions of the Azerbaijani army near the villages of Kesalar, Jangasan, which are on the heights near Stepanakert, and captured the city of Shusha by storm.
This was an amazing operation: the forces of the Karabakh people advancing from bottom to top numbered up to three thousand soldiers in this direction, which was significantly less than that of the defending enemy. At the same time, they had to advance into the mountains, sometimes climbing overgrown slopes. Despite this, all positions were successfully taken, and the losses of the Karabakh people killed and died from wounds amounted to about 50 people, which was several times less than the losses of the enemy, who defended, it would seem, in impregnable positions.
During the assault on Shusha, the Karabakhians lost one of the two tanks they had, which was hit by direct fire from an enemy tank. Two crew members died, and the commander, thrown out by the blast wave from the flying tower, somehow miraculously survived. Today, this tank-monument stands on a platform built near the place of his death, not far from the northern entrance to Shusha, where on May 8, a few vehicles of the advancing Karabakh people moved along the serpentine of the Stepanakert-Shusha highway.
Developing an offensive along the Shusha-Lachin highway, the Karabakh detachments established control over the settlements located on the highway.
In one of these operations, my good comrade Avet Grigoryan died, with whom during the “emergency” we prepared materials for underground radio and leaflets aimed at military personnel. Born in Leninakan, in a family of Armenian refugees from Cilicia, who repatriated from Syria to the USSR after the Second World War, Avet lived for some time in Moscow in his youth, at the then thieves' Taganka, from where he brought a tattoo and the nickname "Greek". Having married a Karabakh girl, he moved to Stepanakert, and when the events began, he became one of the activists of the movement, having served his 30 days of arrest in Novocherkassk in 1990, which are indispensable for this category of persons.
Three children were left without a father, who were raised by his wife Aveta Lyudmila, a pediatrician and a well-known public figure in Karabakh. In the summer of 2007, as part of a delegation of the Armenian intelligentsia (then a series of meetings of the creative intelligentsia of the parties to the conflict was organized in Stepanakert, Yerevan and Baku), she was in Baku, where at a meeting with Ilham Aliyev, the latter again threatened to force a solution to the Karabakh problem. Lyudmila told the Azerbaijani leader to his face that she had not come to listen to threats: she lost her husband in the war, her house was destroyed by Grad shells, she knows the value of words and deeds and therefore is completely disappointed with this visit. Aliyev Jr. fell silent, not knowing what to say in response to the brave woman ...
Meanwhile, the Karabakh people came to the Lachin "cordon sanitaire", which separated the NKR from the Goris region of the Republic of Armenia. Ten days after the liberation of Shushi, Lachin was taken, and the barrier was broken near the Azerbaijani village of Zabukh, where the Karabakh people failed to do so in the fall of 1918. The blockade was broken, food and medicines, fuel and weapons began to flow to the region along the Karabakh "road of life".
This was the end of the first phase of hostilities. But the "real" war - with air raids on cities, powerful shelling, columns of armored vehicles thrown to storm positions, settlements and entire regions - all this was yet to come.
On June 12, 1992, having received weapons and equipment from the 4th Soviet divisions and having thousands of mercenaries in the service from among the officers, ensigns, sergeants and soldiers of the former 4th Army, the Azerbaijani side goes on a surprise offensive and completely occupies the Shaumyan, almost the entire Mardakert region and parts of the Martuni and Askeran regions of the NKR. Up to 45 percent of the territory of the NKR has been occupied, more than 60,000 people have become refugees, thousands have been killed and wounded, and hundreds have gone missing.
In August, the State Defense Committee (GKO) of the NKR was created, which was headed by the future president of the NKR (1994-1997) and the Republic of Armenia (1998-2008) Robert Kocharyan. The State Defense Committee and the Self-Defense Committee, headed since the spring of 1992 by Serzh Sargsyan (since 1993 - Minister of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, then Minister of National Security, Defense, Prime Minister; since February 2008 - President of the Republic of Armenia) conducted a general mobilization and reformed the self-defense forces , bringing them into a single Defense Army of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In September-December, during the defensive battles, the offensive of the Azerbaijani troops was finally stopped, and they themselves were pretty exhausted.
In February-March 1993, the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army launched a counteroffensive, liberating most of the Mardakert region, and at the end of March unexpectedly launched an attack on the Kalbajar region. The latter, along with the northern part of the Lachin region still controlled by Baku, fell in early April. Thus, the threat to the NKR from the Lachin-Kelbajar region of Nagorno-Karabakh was finally eliminated, and a strong rear was created from the west of the republic.
During the summer-autumn of 1993, the cities of Aghdam and Fuzuli and partially the regions of the same name were taken successively; completely - Kubatly, Jabrail and Zangelan regions of the former AzSSR. About 380,000 Azerbaijanis, together with the Azerbaijani army, left the territories of the above-mentioned regions of the former Azerbaijan SSR.
Winter 1993-1994 The Azerbaijani army launched a large-scale offensive using hundreds of armored vehicles and aircraft, with the participation of thousands of mercenaries from the CIS countries and up to 1,500 Afghan Mujahideen. This campaign led to heavy casualties on the warring parties, especially the Azerbaijani one, but did not fundamentally change anything. At the end of April 1994, the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army liberated part of the territory in the north-east of the Mardakert region of the NKR and entered the Aghdam-Barda highway, "saddling" it near the Mirbashir region of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Thanks to the mediation efforts of the Russian Federation, an indefinite ceasefire has been in effect in the region since May 12, 1994.
According to the head of the Russian mediation mission, Vladimir Kazimirov, “Baku did not fulfill the main demand for a ceasefire for more than a year; four agreements on this and other peacekeeping initiatives. There are documents to this effect. It is no coincidence that the UN Security Council, just after the failure of the ceasefire by Azerbaijan in October 1993 and all 4 resolutions on Karabakh, stopped adopting them ... Baku agreed to a truce not because of resolutions, but in the face of the threat of complete collapse. Previously, there was no way to go for reconciliation, and in May 1994 they suddenly began to rush it themselves” 21 .
As for the results of the war, they are visible on the map we have placed, as well as in the document on the occupied territories and refugees given in the appendices. The latter clearly shows that the allegations spread by the Azerbaijani side everywhere and at the highest level about “occupied 20 percent of the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan and a million refugees” are an ordinary lie (in fact, the AR controls 15 percent of the territory of the NKR; and the NKR controls 8 percent of the territory of the former Azerbaijan SSR). Which, by the way, demonstrates the futility of the negotiation process in the current situation: how can a serious agreement be reached when one of the parties to the conflict bases its position and demands on a frank and deliberate lie, which is repeated daily by propaganda, diplomats and the president of this country?
Therefore, concluding the conversation about the Karabakh war, let us turn to some issues of coverage of the war, which, even after almost a decade and a half after its end, continue to alienate the peoples of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan and Armenia, the entire region as a whole from the long-awaited peace.

Asymmetry in event coverage

14 years have passed since the end of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh war, much has already been forgotten not only by the world community, but even in the CIS, including the countries of the region themselves. Under these conditions, the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance and the influential centers of power behind it are conducting permanent and aggressive propaganda aimed at distorting the origins and history of the conflict, the course of hostilities, and the essence of individual events. Some events are hushed up and others are pushed out in every possible way.
Let us consider the asymmetric coverage of war crimes committed during the war by Western, and partially by Russian media, using specific examples. In particular, they one-sidedly presented cases when the Azerbaijani side turned out to be the victim, practically ignoring the crimes of the Azerbaijani army against the people of the NKR during the war.
Above, we twice mentioned the tragic death of the inhabitants of the Azerbaijani (until the early 1970s, by the way, Armenian) village of Khojaly, which occurred after the storming of this village by the NKR self-defense forces, in a field near the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam. Every year in the Republic of Azerbaijan on February 26, the "atrocities of the Armenians" are remembered, events dedicated to the memory of the victims of the tragic "events in Khojaly" are organized.
Meanwhile, already in the very definition of events there is a false vector. Indeed, during the assault on Khojalu, there were practically no casualties among civilians in the village itself.
Of the dead, a part found their death on the territory of the Askeran region. The riot police driven out of the village, not wanting to disarm and surrender, decided to try to break through outside the corridor left for civilians. They drove part of the retreating into the forest to break through under their cover. After they destroyed one of the Karabakh posts, other posts opened machine-gun fire to kill, not sorting out in the predawn twilight who was who in the crowd advancing on them, from where the fire was also fired.
From this fire, because of the human shield, there were also casualties among civilians from the Karabakh side. It was there that the familiar cameraman of the local television Sergei Ambartsumyan died, with whom in August 1991 we made a report for the Russian Vesti from the besieged village of Karintak, near Shusha. Let us also add that there were people at these posts who daily lost their relatives and friends during the shelling of Stepanakert and the border villages near Agdam, near which everything happened.
And the dead civilians captured on the terrible video footage were found 11-12 km from Khojalu, in the field between the Armenian village of Nakhichevanik, which is on the administrative border with the Agdam region of the former Azerbaijan SSR, and Azerbaijani positions near Agdam.
That is, the tragic events, at least, did not take place in Khojaly, but in a completely different place.
Meanwhile, in the reports of the Azerbaijani media, this fact has been omitted for all recent years, and false information is given. For example, on April 12, 2008, the APA agency reported: “On February 26, 1992, Armenian aggressors captured the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly. Innocent people were brutally killed during the attack.”
On July 7, 2008, the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic exposed another propaganda fake by Baku, which tried to distort what happened in Khojaly through a fake photograph posted on a number of Azerbaijani websites.
“According to the intention of the Azerbaijani side, the propaganda value of this photograph, obviously, lies in the fact that in addition to the many corpses of civilians in the foreground, the outskirts of some settlement are visible in the background, which, in theory, should give credibility to Baku’s version of the massacres Azerbaijanis in Khojaly. Meanwhile, the color version of the above photograph completely refutes this in terms of the appearance of the dead, their clothes, etc. In fact, this photo is directly related to the events in Kosovo. It is in this capacity that the photograph, along with many others, is exhibited or mentioned in at least one Serbian, one Albanian and one specialized German forum, on the Internet page of a reputable New York Times publication, etc.
It is curious that some websites, for example, the official website of Azerbaijan about the events in Khojaly (www.khojaly.org), came to their senses and removed this fake from their pages. Nevertheless, on others, including on the page of the website of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation (www.azerbaijan.az), which is revered in Azerbaijan, she continues to show off shamelessly” 22 .
Further. From year to year, the number of victims announced by the Azerbaijani side is growing retroactively. A few days after the assault on Khojalu, Azerbaijani officials called the figure of 100 killed, a week later - 1234; the parliamentary commission clarified it - 450; The decree “on the genocide of Azerbaijanis” issued by Heydar Aliyev refers to thousands of people killed.
Speaking at the OSCE Council in December 1993, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan claims 800 people were killed. And in 1999, announcing his intention to appeal to the International Court, the Secretary of State for National Affairs I. Orudzhev named the following figures: 600 killed, 500 wounded, 1,275 captured.
The Azerbaijani “525th newspaper”, reporting in November 2007 on the forthcoming demonstration of representatives of the Turkish and Azerbaijani diasporas in Berlin in connection with the “Khojaly genocide”, claimed: “during the capture of this city in one night ... 613 civilians were killed with extreme cruelty, including 63 children, 106 women, 70 old people” 23 .
Meanwhile, according to official Azerbaijani evidence, at the time of the assault there were not so many civilians in Khojaly. Most of the approximately 2-2.5 thousand inhabitants of Khojaly, that is, those who actually lived in the village, and were not registered in it during the period of rapid construction, left the village ahead of time.
Thus, at the end of April 1993 in Prague at the Conference of the CSCE, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan distributed document No. 249, entitled "List of Azerbaijani-populated and mixed villages in the upper part of Karabakh, occupied by the Armenian armed forces." Opposite the name "Khojaly" in the column "population" in this document was the number: 855.
Fantastic figures and ideas about Khojalu gradually migrate to the works of some Russian researchers. So, for example, in the book of today’s popular military history researcher Alexei Shishov “Military conflicts of the 20th century”, in the section on the Karabakh conflict, we read: “In February, the second largest city of Nagorno-Karabakh, Khojaly, was taken (modern Azerbaijani transcription of the name - author's note). ), inhabited by Azerbaijanis” 24 .
At the same time, it is known that not only was Khojaly not a city (there were three of them in the NKAO except Stepanakert: Shusha, Mardakert and Martuni), but it was not even included in the ten largest villages of the NKAO-NKR.
And in the new book of Nikolai Zenkovich "Ilham Aliyev", published in 2008 and which is another apology for the Aliyev clan (a year earlier, his book "Heydar Aliyev. Zigzags of Fate", to which we also referred in the first chapter), are given and completely fantastic figures, clearly borrowed from Azeragitprop: “On the night of February 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces attacked the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly with a population of 6,000 people” 25 ...
In the first ten days of March 1992, the author of this book, together with the Yerevan correspondent of the Interfax agency and two Azerbaijani colleagues from the Russian service of Radio Liberty, was invited to the office of the Memorial human rights center. Azerbaijani correspondents Ilya Balakhanov and Vugar Khalilov brought a video cassette with footage of the place of death of Khojaly residents, made by Baku TV journalists from the board of a military helicopter and directly on the field.
These terrible shots alternated, sometimes repeated from a different angle. Almost all those present at that time agreed that the number of victims captured on film did not exceed 50-60 people. All other recordings and photographs shown later on television and printed in various media, one way or another, were part of the recording we saw in Memorial. True, later "Memorial" spoke about 181 bodies of Khojaly residents who died near Aghdam.
Also on the film it was seen that the bodies of the dead were scattered over a large area, in an open field. A certain settlement was visible a few kilometers from the shooting site, in which, at the maximum zoom in of the image, the cameraman recognized the urban-type settlement of Askeran, the regional center of the NKR region of the same name, located on the Stepanakert-Agdam highway between Khojalu and Aghdam, approximately in the middle between them. Which also confirmed that the fact of the massacre did not take place in Khojalu, and not during the storming of the village.
After the death of civilians in Baku, a scandal erupted, which resulted in the forced resignation of President Ayaz Mutalibov under the threat of an uprising of military units subordinate to the Popular Front. A month after his resignation, Mutalibov gave an interview to Czech journalist Dana Mazalova, which was published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Speaking about Khojaly, Mutalibov, in particular, said: “As those Khojaly residents who escaped say, all this was organized in order to be a reason for my resignation. Some force acted to discredit the president. I do not think that the Armenians, who are very clear and knowledgeable about such situations, could allow the Azerbaijanis to receive documents exposing them of fascist actions ... If I say that this is the fault of the Azerbaijani opposition, they can say that I am slandering them. But the general background of reasoning is such that the corridor through which people could leave was still left by the Armenians. Why would they shoot then? Especially in the territory close to Aghdam, where by that time there were enough forces to go out and help people” 26 .
Almost 10 years later, the Azerbaijani ex-president confirmed his idea in an interview with the Novoye Vremya magazine: “It was obvious that the execution of the Khojaly residents was organized by someone to shift the government in Azerbaijan” 27 .
Independent Azerbaijani cameraman Chingiz Mustafayev, who filmed on February 28 and March 2, 1992, also doubted the official version and began his own investigation. However, in June 1992, he was killed while filming combat under unclear circumstances.
Another Azerbaijani journalist, Eynulla Fatullayev, from the opposition independent magazine Monitor, spent ten days in the NKR and adjacent territories in February 2005, which he told about in his materials and interviews. He also allowed himself to doubt the veracity of the official version of Baku about the death of a group of Khojaly residents:
“...Several years ago, I met with Khodjaly refugees temporarily residing in Nafatalan, who openly confessed to me...that a few days before the offensive, the Armenians continuously warned the population over the loudspeakers about the planned operation, offered the civilian population to leave the village and go out from the encirclement through the humanitarian corridor, along the Karkar River. According to the Khodjaly residents themselves, they used this corridor, and indeed, the Armenian soldiers located behind the corridor did not open fire on them. For some reason, some soldiers from the PFA battalions led part of the Khojaly residents to the village of Nakhichevanik, which at that time was under the control of the Askeran battalion of Armenians. And the rest was covered at the foot of the Aghdam region with an artillery salvo.
… Having familiarized myself with the geographical area, I can say with full conviction that the speculation about the absence of an Armenian corridor is groundless. There really was a corridor, otherwise the Khojaly people, completely surrounded and isolated from the outside world, would not have been able to break through the rings and get out of the encirclement. But, having crossed the area beyond the Karkar River, the line of refugees split up, and for some reason part of the Khojaly people headed towards Nakhichevanik. It seems that the PFA battalions were striving not for the liberation of the Khojaly residents, but for more bloodshed on the way to overthrow A. Mutalibov” 28 .
A few days after the publication of the first report by E. Fatullayev from Nagorno-Karabakh in the "Monitor", on March 2, 2005, the editor of the magazine, Elmar Huseynov, was shot by an unknown person at the entrance of his own house in Baku. "Monitor" was known as the most radical opposition magazine and had the highest circulation among Azerbaijani weeklies. The magazine's criticism of the ruling authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan has repeatedly provoked responses in the form of political and judicial persecution of both the editor himself and other journalists, financial sanctions, and temporary closure of the magazine. However, it did not come to an attempt. This happened only after the publication of Fatullayev's reports in the Monitor.
Eynulla Fatullayev himself had been in prison for almost two years at the time the book was handed over, convicted on a whole bunch of charges, including treason...
On the footage of the chronicle shown at the meeting of "Memorial", many children were seen among the dead. They were almost half of all those killed, filmed on a video camera in the field between the Armenian Nakhichevanik and the Azerbaijani Aghdam.
In the chapter “Massacre in Sumgayit”, we cited the words of the Armenian journalist Samvel Shahmuradyan, who devoted several years to investigating the Sumgayit events, that there were no victims among children during the Armenian pogroms in Sumgayit and Mingachevir: “Although there were attempts. The bandits were stopped not only by the pleas of their parents, but also by the mention of other members of the gang that we do not kill children ... I talked with a seriously wounded woman. What happened to her husband, she does not know. The last time she saw him lay in blood. But when she begged the bandits not to touch the children, she was told: “We don't touch the children. Are we Armenians? We are not Armenians” 29 .
Obviously, the remark of the pogromists that they do not touch children, since "they are not Armenians", meant, in accordance with the logic of the organizers and ideologists of the pogroms, that "Armenians kill Azerbaijani children." If back in 1988, such conversations and rumors were in circulation among the Azerbaijani masses (like “a carriage of children with severed fingers”), then one can imagine what a convincing argument for the “barbarism of Armenians” was for the Azerbaijani society the fact of the mass death of Khojaly residents, including many children.
Let's compare the attitude of the official Azerbaijani propaganda towards two tragedies: the massacre in Sumgayit and the death of the inhabitants of Khojalu in the field near Agdam.
Sumgait. In the big city, in front of tens of thousands of people, for three days there were first rallies with anti-Armenian slogans and inflammatory appeals, and then Armenian pogroms. Many hundreds of people testified as witnesses, dozens were arrested, and there were a number of trials. Official Azerbaijani propaganda claims that the pogrom was organized by "Armenian nationalists" to discredit the Azerbaijanis.
Khojalu. At a distance of 11-12 km from this settlement, in an open field, on a neutral zone between the posts of Karabakh Armenians and Azerbaijani armed formations, unknown persons are shooting a group of retreating residents of Khojaly. Everything happens without witnesses. It is known - and this is recognized by high-ranking officials in Baku - that the Karabakh forces left a corridor for the retreat of civilians, along which hundreds of Khojaly residents successfully reached the Azerbaijani positions near Aghdam. The very access of Karabakh Armenians to the place of massacre is practically impossible. Meanwhile, a day later, someone returns to the field again to desecrate some of the corpses before another visit by foreign journalists to the scene of the tragedy.
Even in this case, the official Azerbaijani propaganda unequivocally asserts that the murder was the work of the Armenians, although even many of the former Azerbaijani leaders do not believe in this version. Above, we quoted the opinion of the ex-president Mutalibov. And the ex-Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan Rahim Gaziyev said that in Khojalu "a trap was prepared for Mutalibov."
Thus, the organizers of the mass murder of Khojaly residents achieved two goals at once: they removed A. Mutalibov, who became unnecessary after the collapse of the USSR, and got a reason to start a noisy campaign to accuse the Armenians of inhuman methods of warfare.
At the same time, the terrible truth seemed to fade into the background that since February 13, the Azerbaijani army began to methodically destroy the 55,000-strong Stepanakert from "Grads", the inhabitants of which, even if they wanted to leave the besieged Karabakh, simply had nowhere to go.
All this fit well into the framework of a number of actions taken place both earlier and later by the Turkish special services. Similar actions took place not only in Transcaucasia, but also in the Balkans, where the intervention of Ankara's special services in the war in Bosnia was quite obvious. It is known that during the Serb siege of Sarajevo, at least three times some special services organized major terrorist attacks, the victims of which were Muslim Bosniaks.
“Every time the Western powers prepare to use force against the Serbs, a 'mysterious' massacre immediately comes to light. And each time, images that stagger the imagination are circulated all over the world… the media pass a guilty verdict without bothering to investigate, and public opinion, indignant against the Serbs, approves all the military preparations of the West” 30 .
In 1995, on the eve of NATO bombing of Bosnian Serb positions, dozens of people in Sarajevo were killed when a mine hit a bread line at a market in the Muslim part of the city. However, later it turned out that in this case, as in the other two, Serbian forces were only unfoundedly blamed: according to UN reports and other sources, all three terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslim nationalists of Izetbegovic in order to blame the other side for the bloodshed 31 .
Just before the handover of this book, a message came from Belgrade about the arrest of the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic. Numerous reports from NTV and other Russian programs, probably borrowed from Western TV news, featured clips from the Bosnian war. In many of them, the author recognized the recording of 1995, made immediately after the explosion of a mine in a market in Sarajevo. Once refuted, the false accusation is again invoked at the right moment.
Meanwhile, the leader of the Popular Front, Abulfaz Elchibey (Aliyev), who soon after the resignation of Ayaz Mutalibov became president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, previously openly stated: “The more blood is shed, the better the courage and ideology of the nation will be cemented.” And the Gray Wolves organization, patronized by Turkish special services, had its own Azerbaijani branch, whose leader Iskander Hamidov became the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan under President Elchibey.
That is, we can quite confidently assume that the killing of Khojaly residents in the field near Aghdam is nothing more than an action by Turkish and Azerbaijani special services, designed to justify in the eyes of the world community Baku's barbaric methods of waging a war with the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
It is no coincidence that back in 1918, the representative of the Austro-Hungarian military press center in Ottoman Turkey, Stefan Steiger, said about the methods of Turkish propaganda: are the biggest criminals in the world, and the Turks are the innocent victims of Armenian barbarism.” Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel spoke in approximately this spirit at a press conference in Moscow on May 26, 1992. The author of this book then asked him a question: why did Turkey speak about human rights only now (that is, after the capture of Shusha and the breakthrough of the Lachin corridor), and before that, when the rights of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh were violated, did it remain silent? S. Demirel stated in a rather harsh tone that he was not going to discuss this issue, since “after the genocide in Khojaly” everything is clear anyway.”
And here is another terrible event of the same period of the war, many witnesses of which survived and gave appropriate testimony. But the "free media" both in the West and in Russia practically ignored him.
On the night of April 10, the Azerbaijani army, supported by armored vehicles of the 23rd (Kirovabad) division, attacked the 3,000-strong border village of Maraga in the Mardakert region of the NKR. The local self-defense detachment was forced to retreat, and the village passed into the hands of the Azerbaijanis for 4 hours. It happened so quickly that many residents did not have time to leave. When the united self-defense detachments liberated the village, a monstrous picture appeared before their eyes: disfigured, sawn into pieces corpses, burned bodies, dozens of prisoners taken prisoner.
Baroness Caroline Cox was in Nagorno-Karabakh at the time with a group of members of Christian Solidarity International, and the mission became aware of the tragedy. In the book by C. Cox and John Eibner “Ethnic cleansing continues. War in Nagorno-Karabakh” 32 says about the visit to Maragha:
“The fact-finding group went there to see the surviving villagers in a state of shock, their burned and still smoldering houses, charred corpses and naked human bones lying where people were cut off their heads with a saw, and the bodies were burned in front of their families ... To verify the veracity of the stories told, the delegation asked the residents to open up some of the fresh graves. Overcoming pain and suffering, they did this by allowing photographs of decapitated and charred bodies ... "
“The footage taken in those days in Maragha depicts evidence of a terrible massacre that took place here: decapitated and dismembered bodies, the remains of children, bloody earth and pieces of bodies in those places where Azerbaijanis sawed up living people ... We saw sharp sickles with dried blood, which used for dismemberment" 33 .
On the initiative of Narine Aghabalyan, a Karabakh journalist and head of the Milky Way studio, a CD with terrible footage and testimonies was released on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Maraga tragedy. N. Aghabalyan told in an interview to the Internet edition "Caucasian Knot" 34 that, according to the available data, on April 10, 1992, 81 people were brutally killed in Maragha, 67 were taken prisoner. Some of the hostages were then exchanged, but the fate of many have so far remained unknown.
As mentioned above, there were many dozens of eyewitnesses to the massacre in Maraga. Human bodies, sawn and chopped into pieces, burned, decapitated - everything was recorded on film. What was the reaction of the Western media to the tragedy that occurred in Maragha? Yes, none!
Baroness Caroline Cox says: “The English newspaper The Daily Telegraph agreed with me on an exclusive report (on the Maraga tragedy - author's note) on its pages, so I did not apply to other newspapers. However, time passed, but there was no publication. I called the editor-in-chief, and he said that he decided not to publish the material. “But a few weeks ago you published a report on the events in Khojaly, why don't you want to publish the truth about the tragedy in Maragha?” I asked. He replied, "I don't think we should trade tragedy while keeping the balance." And hung up the phone."
Why did the Western, primarily the American and British media, take such an asymmetric approach in covering the Karabakh war? And later - in relation to the post-war period as well?
Everything is very simple: they were interested in the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh from the point of view of human rights violations only when its exaggeration was in favor of the disintegration of the USSR. When this happened, the newly independent states became the basis for the West, which allowed it to prevent the possible restoration of any union in the space of the former USSR. Especially at the head of Russia, in relation to which the United States and its allies have seen notes of irritation and hostility throughout the post-Soviet years.
When the place of the Soviet army, which shelled and deported the Karabakh villages, was replaced by the Azerbaijani national army, which widely used "Grad" and aircraft against the Karabakh people, Nagorno-Karabakh and the rights of its inhabitants were no longer interested in the Atlantic alliance. On the contrary, the suffering of the "new democracies" from the allegedly supported by Moscow "separatists" just began to correspond to the political line of both Washington and London.
In August 1993, the Parisian Russian-language newspaper Russkaya Mysl aptly commented on this: “It is curious how the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who in the past have always been honored with the protection of Mond, lost his sympathy from the moment when, with the help of the Russians, their position seemed to become improve. "Mond" now sympathizes more with Azerbaijan, despite the fact that "one of the most heavy-handed KGB men has come to power" there, as the American press calls Aliyev. Indeed, everything is known about Aliyev's past, and his future - if he remains in power - is not difficult to predict, just as it is very easy to calculate in which direction his policy will be directed. We would not be surprised by his alliance with the newly minted democrat Shevardnadze, who has always been honored by the Western press as a “cunning secret conductor of democracy”, and now this press is ready to take his side and against Abkhazia, about which they know little…” 36
Attempts to appeal to the world community in order to divert its attention from the ethnic cleansing and pogroms carried out in the AzSSR - Azerbaijan Republic were carried out by official Baku before. In the chapter “First Blood”, we already said that after the January 1990 Armenian pogroms in Baku, which surpassed the massacre in Sumgayit, Azerbaijani propaganda returned to the issue of Azerbaijani refugees from the Armenian SSR. At the same time, lies and misinformation, which are common for this propaganda, were used.
A similar “stuffing” into the “democratic” media associated with the West was undertaken by the already mentioned Arif Yunusov exactly one year after the Armenian pogroms in Baku. Back in 1991, he published an article entitled “Pogroms in Armenia in 1988-1989” in the weekly human rights newspaper Express-chronika 37 . The article was accompanied by a list of names of 215 citizens of Azerbaijani nationality who allegedly died during the pogroms. Previously, it was known about 25 Azerbaijanis who died during the events in November-December 1989 in the ArmSSR.
These events were in the nature of armed clashes, during which there were casualties on both sides, and after which a mass exodus of more than 100 thousand of the Azerbaijani population of the Armenian SSR followed (that is, all Azerbaijanis, with the exception of those who left earlier, exchanging their apartments, houses with Baku Armenians). They took place mainly in the north of the republic - 20 out of 25 Azerbaijanis and most of the 17 Armenians died there - shortly after the arrival of the flow of Armenian refugees from Kirovabad and adjacent Armenian villages. It is significant that, unlike Yerevan, where there was practically no Azerbaijani population, internal troops were not deployed at all in the rural areas of the ArmSSR, although more than 90 percent of the Azerbaijani inhabitants of the republic lived in rural areas.
By the winter of 1991, when Yunusov's material appeared, the Armenian KGB, like the Azerbaijani one, was actually pursuing an independent policy, though not in line with, but against the line of the center. In particular, in the spring of 1991, a scandal erupted in Moscow when it turned out that the Yerevan Chekists had transferred most of the emergency stock of weapons from their arsenal to Nagorno-Karabakh.
On behalf of the head of the Armenian KGB, Usik Harutyunyan, 38 a thorough additional check was carried out on each person indicated on Yunusov's list. It turned out that, with the exception of 25 people who actually died, the rest of the people on Yunusov's list were not victims of clashes or pogroms. Either they were never in the republic at all; safely left it (62 people), and the addresses of residence of many of them were known; either died in the ArmSSR even before the events, died or perished on the territory of the AzSSR and the third republics of the USSR.
For example, one "killed" went to live in the RSFSR in 1987; another moved to the Kustanai region of the Kazakh SSR in 1984 and his address was attached, and so on. The 20 people listed as killed during the pogroms actually died, but not as a result of violent death. Moreover, one died in a car accident back in 1963, and the other, who was listed in the “Yunusov list” as “who died from beatings”, “on March 18, 1988, while grazing on a railway line ... fell under a railcar, as a result of which he died on the spot , in this accident, 17 heads of small ruminants died at the same time” 39 .
According to U. Harutyunyan, “we documented that the compiled list ... is exaggerated almost 10 times. Did the drafters of the document really not think about the fact that they blaspheme against their own people, ranking the living among the dead? It seems that the most important thing in this case is to seek the truth for their own people. Enough to embitter him with lies, to make a beast out of him.
Finally, some of the names of Armenian functionaries given by Yunusov were invented. In a word, Mr. A. Yunusov was convicted of a deliberate lie, which, however, does not prevent the same Western journalists and political scientists from referring to his falsifications in their works. The already mentioned Thomas de Waal in his book "The Black Garden", speaking about the exodus of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR, is based precisely on the "Yunusov's list" published in the "Express-Chronicle" 41 .
At the same time, in the preface to his book, T. de Waal double-facedly urges the reader "not to engage in selective quoting of individual passages from the book for the sake of their own political interests" 42 . Truly, the devil is in the details!
Cynical and unfounded falsifications remain in service with the Baku agitprop today. Giving a fair head start to A. Yunusov in his fabrications, Candidate of Historical Sciences Israfil Mammadov stated on Azerbaijani television on March 25, 2001: “In general, you will not find anywhere an analogue of the tragedy committed against Azerbaijanis on the territory of present-day Armenia. Most recently, on November 12, 1988, in the Spitak region, a few weeks before the earthquake, 70 Azerbaijani children (note, we are talking about children again - author's note) were driven into a pipe and welded its ends. And 25 children were put on buses and sent somewhere. 350 people were killed that day. However, the world does not know about it” 43 .

Military myths and tales

The arguments of idle journalists and political scientists on the topic of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict, both then and today, are very reminiscent of Balzaminov’s dialogue with the alleged mother-in-law from the film Balzaminov’s Marriage, based on the works of N. Ostrovsky:
“Do you read newspapers?
- I'm reading.
- So I wanted to ask you, have you read anything about Napoleon? They say he wants to go to Moscow again!
- Well, where is he now, sir. He hasn't had time to settle down yet. They write that they are palaces, but they decorate rooms.
- Well, thank God. Yes, tell me more. They say that King Pharaoh began to come out of the sea at night, and with an army. It will show itself, and it will go away again, it will show itself, and it will go away again! They say it's just before the end!
- Very likely!
- How to live in the world? What passions! Times are hard! Yes, they say, the white black is rising on us, leading 200 million troops!
- And where is he from, a white black man?
- From White Arabia!
- BUT! The newspapers are somehow deaf about it ... "
The Turkish-Azerbaijani propaganda has been operating in approximately the same spirit for many years, deliberately distorting and dissecting the events of the second Karabakh war of 1991-1994 in favor of the goals and interests of pan-Turkism.
The most important military-political myth, especially often used today by Azerbaijani and Turkish propaganda: Armenia committed aggression against Azerbaijan in order to seize Nagorno-Karabakh from the latter.
It seems that all the previous chapters of this book - about what preceded the events of 1988, how the events developed after February 20 of the same year until the collapse of the USSR - in themselves refute this myth. Let us add to this some important details of the period of hostilities.
From the end of September 1991 to May 18, 1992, the NKR was under complete blockade. Communication with "mainland" Armenia was possible only by helicopters. It is impossible to transfer any heavy military equipment by Mi-8 civil aviation helicopters. It is impossible to transfer it (except perhaps for certain types of guns or the Grad installation) and Mi-26 helicopters, which, moreover, were only at the disposal of the army and were only occasionally allocated to transport the wounded, sick and evacuees.
In March 1992, by the way, such a helicopter, transporting the wounded and sick from the Shaumyan region of Nagorno-Karabakh to Yerevan, was fired upon by Azerbaijani Mi-24 combat helicopters over the Kalbajar region and made an emergency landing; more than 20 people died and dozens were injured.
In the same month, a mercenary pilot flying an Azerbaijani Air Force combat aircraft fired on an Armenian Airlines Yak-40 en route from Stepanakert Airport to Yerevan with the wounded and sick on board. The pilots were able to land the damaged plane on its belly at the airport of the Armenian regional center of Sisian, in Zangezur; all passengers were rescued.
The above facts show how difficult the blockade of the province was in the first half of 1992. Therefore, only Armenian volunteers with small arms and light artillery could really strengthen the Karabakh self-defense forces, who, at the risk of their lives, got into the NKR on civil aviation helicopters through the Azerbaijani "cordon sanitaire".
On May 18, detachments of Karabakh Armenians from Shushi reached Lachin, behind which, in the town of Zabuh, they joined with self-defense detachments from the Goris region of the Republic of Armenia. That is, the offensive came from the depths of Nagorno-Karabakh in the direction of Lachin, and not vice versa.
Azerbaijani artillery and aviation (we note that the Armenian side did not have combat aircraft at all) throughout 1992 and early 1993 shelled and bombed the border regions of the Republic of Armenia. The border town of 50,000 Armenians Kafan, the administrative center of Zangezur, was especially affected at that time, which was subjected to air raids and fired from guns and mortars. In October-November 1992, Kapan was shelled almost daily; in one of the attacks, a shell exploded in a line for bread, killing 28 people at once.
There was intense shelling of the eastern shore of Lake Sevan, especially the city of Krasnoselsk, where many ethnic Russians, the so-called Molokans, lived. These shellings especially intensified when the Azerbaijani army in August 1992 captured the Armenian village of Artsvashen in the same Krasnoselsky region, located in an enclave 46 km 2 outside the main territory of the region. In Stalin's times, this large settlement, which occupied an important strategic position, turned from part of the territory of the Armenian SSR into an enclave on the territory of the AzSSR.
That is, in 1992, the independent Republic of Azerbaijan seized part of the territory of the also independent Republic of Armenia, but this fact did not receive any assessment from international organizations such as the OSCE and the UN!
Russian Ambassador Vladimir Stupishin, who arrived in the city of Krasnoselsk at the request of the local Russian population during the shelling, said in December 1992: “There is no such idea for which you can sacrifice other people’s lives, drive women and children into basements, smash civilian objects, leave people without light, without bread, without heat. And if there is such an idea, it is a criminal idea” 44 .
However, it must be borne in mind here that Baku did not and does not at all consider the barbaric bombardments of the civilian population during the war as something unacceptable. From the point of view of the Baku rulers, where this happened (including the Armenian Zangezur) was "Azerbaijani lands", over which it was necessary to restore "previously lost sovereignty." And the foreign population was an unnecessary addition to these territories, with which the "owners" could do as they pleased.
Without drawing lessons from the past, Azerbaijani leaders continue to reason in the same spirit today.
Interesting facts about the true vector of aggression can also be gleaned from Azerbaijani sources proper. Thus, in 1995, the Azerbaijani Center for Strategic and International Studies published a book by Jangir Arasli “Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. military aspect. There is an interesting document in the book: table No. 4 "The beginning of the use of modern weapons and forms of warfare by the parties to the conflict." It follows from the table that "defending against the aggression of Armenia" Azerbaijan was the first to apply during the war:

• multiple launch rocket system BM-21 "Grad" (January 13, 1992);
• fire support helicopter Mi-24 (February 13, 1992);
• tactical helicopter landing (March 5, 1992);
• attack aircraft Su-25 (May 8, 1992);
• parachute landing (September 18, 1992).

According to the same Jangir Arasli, the Armenian side was the first to use only the Igla portable anti-aircraft missile system. As you know, the latter is not an offensive weapon, but intended for use against enemy aircraft. On January 30, 1992, he shot down a Mi-8 helicopter carrying a unit of Azerbaijani soldiers from Aghdam to Shusha, shortly after an unsuccessful attack on the Armenian village of Karintak near Shusha.
As you can see, specific figures and facts do not testify to "Armenia's aggression against Azerbaijan", but rather to the latter's aggression against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and the Republic of Armenia.
Another myth. At the philistine level, many in the Republic of Azerbaijan are quite sincerely convinced that their country lost the war not to the Karabakh Armenians, who were supported by the Armenian volunteers, and not even to the “aggressor Armenia”. And, it turns out ... Russia!
This myth was generated by the unwillingness of the Azerbaijani mass consciousness, especially the representatives of the younger generation, to come to terms with the idea that "broadly walking" Azerbaijan lost the war to the Armenians, who, according to a false belief, were for some reason considered incapable of war. Although it is known that both in tsarist and Soviet times they showed themselves quite well in wars, while the "Caucasian Tatars", like other Muslims of the Caucasus and Turkestan, were not drafted into the army at all under the tsar.
Perhaps, Soviet propaganda played a cruel joke here, which, in order to prevent separatism in the Armenian SSR, for decades, unsuccessfully drummed into the consciousness of the local society the idea of ​​the sacrificial nature of the Armenian people, their inability to take any independent steps without the help of the Kremlin. An interesting fact: during the years of Soviet power, weapons completely disappeared from the traditional Armenian costume. Although in pre-revolutionary photographs, dance and choir groups from the same Shusha were always dressed in a traditional mountain costume with daggers.
The myth of the "Russian hand", although very tenacious in the Azerbaijani society, is broken quite simply. Combat losses on the Armenian side are known almost by name. During the war, 5856 fighters were killed, of which 3291 were residents of the NKR (56% of the dead). The remaining 2565 dead, with the exception of just over a hundred citizens of foreign countries (mostly of Armenian origin), were citizens of the Republic of Armenia. Among the dead were several dozen volunteers of Russian and other "non-Armenian" nationalities from the CIS countries.
Among the dead on the Armenian side were also 1,264 civilians of the NKR - their vast majority - and the border regions of the Republic of Armenia. 596 people - military and civilian (among the latter almost exclusively NKR citizens) went missing.
On the Azerbaijani side, according to various sources, the loss of only the dead amounted to 25 to 30 thousand people. By the way, during the war years, official Baku sometimes hid the true extent of its losses, declaring the dead missing and allegedly being held captive in "Armenian dungeons." Thus, the poor relatives of the dead were encouraged, and Azerbaijani propaganda spread fables to the outside world about secret prisoner-of-war camps, where internal organs are removed from prisoners for sale abroad.
If the Republic of Azerbaijan waged war not with the Armenians of Karabakh and not with the Armenians at all, but “with the Russian army”, then where are the lists of Russian losses, why is nothing known about this until now?
And if those few Slavs who laid down their lives defending Karabakh are the losses of the “Russian expeditionary force”, then where did such heavy losses come from on the Azerbaijani side? That is, if you believe this myth, the Azerbaijani army lost to the “Russians”, losing a thousand of its dead citizens for one dead “aggressor”. So isn't it more logical for Azaragitprop to agree with the real figures of the losses of the real enemy - the Karabakh and "Armenian" Armenians?
Finally, another myth. Spreading tales since Soviet times about the participation of foreign mercenaries on the Armenian side, including “negroes”, “Arabs” and the notorious “Baltic snipers”, official Baku clumsily tried to divert attention from the massive use of mercenaries by the Azerbaijani army.
The latter circumstance was due to the unpopularity of the war among the majority of Azerbaijanis, who were mostly driven into the army by force. On September 30, 1992, the first ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Armenia, Vladimir Stupishin, visiting Baku as part of the Russian delegation led by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, later recalled in his memoirs: “Shonia (Walter Shonia, Russian Ambassador to the Republic of Azerbaijan - author's note ) introduced me to some Azerbaijani officials who immediately attacked the Armenians ... accusing them of ... the use of mercenaries in the war with poor, unfortunate Azerbaijan. Naturally, I reminded them of Russian and Ukrainian pilots flying on Azerbaijani planes and even being captured by bad Karabakh people 45 ...
The interlocutor tried to convince me that the Azerbaijani youth is almost enthusiastically striving for the Karabakh front. Yes, I reacted, probably because of this enthusiasm, many of the dead have holes in the backs of their heads. The Azerbaijanian choked. Apparently, he never heard such objections.
In general, it must be said that the main principle of the Turkish-Azerbaijani propaganda was and remains the principle of "monkey". A "monkey" in journalistic jargon used to be called (when there were no computers and printers yet) a mirror imprint of text that remained on the back of a typewritten sheet when a sheet of carbon paper was incorrectly positioned behind it.
So, the "monkey", a shifter, in propaganda is the attribution of one's own problems, sins or intentions and one's own secret desires to the enemy, as well as their fake voicing, as if by the opposite side. Among specific examples here are “aggression against Azerbaijan”, “pogrom tripled by Armenians in Sumgayit”, “atrocities of Armenians in Khojalu”, Armenian “Arab mercenaries” and so on. At the same time, the methods of disinformation remain the same twenty years ago and today.
For example, the Azerbaijani Trend agency distributes on the website bakililar.az an interview with the former military commandant of the state of emergency in the NKAR and adjacent regions of the AzSSR, Major General Heinrich Malyushkin. Thus, who distinguished himself by repressions and false attempts to refute the obvious facts of Memorial's mission in the summer of 1990. This military pensioner is a frequent guest of the embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Moscow and periodically gives Azeragitprop another portion of lies.
A retired major general fantasizes on a topic given by a correspondent: “How did you know that mercenaries fought on the Armenian side? - When we managed to neutralize them, we tried to talk to them, even with the help of an interpreter in Armenian. But they didn't understand. It was clear that they were mercenaries. Mostly Arabs. Well, why not a white black from Balzaminov's Marriage?
Meanwhile, not at all mythical, not seen by anyone and not presented alive or dead to the public, “negroes”, “Arabs” and “blond beasts - snipers” fought on the Azerbaijani side. And quite real pilots and tankers from the former 4th Army, Turkish military advisers, Chechen detachments led by Shamil Basayev and up to one and a half thousand Afghan Mujahideen from tribes subordinate to the country's rebellious Prime Minister Gulbetdin Hekmatyar. Many of the mercenaries were killed, captured, their documents and testimonies became the property of local and foreign media.
Turkish advisers trained Azerbaijani units and divisions, trying not to take a direct part in the hostilities, although there was information about a number of sabotage raids in which Turkish commandos took part. In Turkey itself, thousands of Azerbaijani soldiers were trained and retrained, including veterans of the Afghan and other local wars of the Soviet period.
Personally, Sh. Basayev repeatedly spoke in his numerous interviews about his participation in the Azerbaijani-Karabakh war, and dozens of Chechen fighters were killed and captured by the Karabakh people during the hostilities. Many captured Chechens were handed over to the emissaries from Grozny who arrived in Stepanakert after their assurances that they would stop interfering in the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict.
During the fighting in 1993-1994. The Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army also seized documents, including official correspondence from the commanders of a number of units of the Azerbaijani army, which spoke about the number of Afghan Mujahideen and related problems.
Here are some excerpts from these documents (with the preservation of style and spelling), which were presented by the Karabakh side to the mediators, to the OSCE Minsk Group on Nagorno-Karabakh as evidence of the use of foreign mercenaries by official Baku.
From the order and.about. Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Colonel I. Aslamov:
“To call from the reserve 50 (fifty) translators liable for military service with knowledge of the Persian language 47 and send at the disposal of the commander of the military unit 160 ac. Center "Geran". 19.08.1993"
The named military unit in Soviet times was a training center where military personnel of the Kirovabad division of the Airborne Forces and the GRU special forces brigade stationed there were trained and trained. Privatized by the Azerbaijani national army, Geran was one of several military units where Afghan mercenaries were retrained before being sent to the front. Below are a number of documents with the spelling of the original preserved.
From the book of orders of the military unit No. 160 for 03.08 - 09.09. 1993.
“691 people are on the boiler allowance. Of them:

1. Military unit 160: officers - 25, ensigns - 3, sergeants - 65, soldiers - 31, enlisted. – 53.
2. Tank battalion: officers - 17, ensigns - 15, sergeants - 15, soldiers - 80, enlisted. – 3.
3. Mujahideen - 453".

“Order No. 129 September 05, 1993. Educational center Geranium. On the military side.
... Consider those who have gone to a military hospital in the mountains. Ganja military unit 230 from 09/05/1993 27 (twenty-seven) Mujahideen for inpatient treatment.
The commander of military unit 160, Colonel D. Latifov, in a report addressed to the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan dated October 2, 1993, complains about the Afghan "special contingent":
“Demand: one extra blanket each; filtered cigarettes (Astra is categorically refused); shoes and uniforms; toilet soap and washcloths; toothpaste and shoe polish; cars (taxi); spices for cooking pilaf; the tea in stock does not suit them; poultry and dairy products, eggs…
Improving the quality of medical care, but the complete absence of honey. equipment in the medical unit does not allow. The attendance of the medical unit was 1350 people during the stay and 41 people were hospitalized. One gets the impression that they came to us for treatment, and not to fight.
Due to the small number of l / s units (only 37 soldiers, sergeants), service is difficult ... We have to clean up after them garbage, dishes that are thrown anywhere.
... The Goranboy executive power distributed 80 aftafa 48 and 30 teapots in the form of humanitarian aid.”
Colonel D. Latifov’s request to the head of logistics of military unit 200 from No. 236 of September 1993 sounded like a cry of despair: “In order to meet the additional requirements of the command of the special contingent, I ask you to immediately allocate the following items: milk, fat, chickens (live), everything you need for pilaf , electric meat grinder, greens, bell pepper, fruits (various), honey for breakfast, fresh green beans, eggplant, shampal for barbecue, drushlyak. Allocate the above names at the rate of 460 (four hundred and sixty) people.
As noted above, there were up to one and a half thousand Afghan Mujahideen in the ranks of the Azerbaijani army in 1993-1994. The Afghan authorities dissociated themselves from these people, because, as already mentioned, they represented the forces of the rebellious Prime Minister Hekmatyar, who was supported by the government of Pakistan, in opposition to official Kabul. The latter, by the way, assisted Baku in training its own pilots, who initially the Azerbaijani army did not have, with a few exceptions, and also actively supported Baku's positions in the international arena.
The Mujahideen were especially actively used by the Azerbaijani side in the fight against the tanks and armored vehicles of the NKR Defense Army, especially during the latter's counteroffensives. Many Mujahideen died on the battlefield. Despite the fact that surrender was not in the rules of the "fighters for the faith", one of them - a certain Bakhtiyar from Mazar-i-Sharif - was still captured alive and clearly, so to speak, demonstrated to the world community (later he was released). Interviews with the captured Mujahideen were then published in a number of Russian and foreign media.
The Azerbaijani side, however, failed to present to the international community evidence of the participation of mercenaries from the Armenian side. It was problematic to consider the few Slavic volunteers who fought on the Karabakh side, who are citizens of other countries, as such, since they received practically no remuneration for their participation in hostilities. And what kind of remuneration and special conditions (remember the requests of the Mujahideen and the unquestioning desire of the Azerbaijani "fathers-commanders" to satisfy them) could be in the besieged, hungry, warring Karabakh?
These people, with the exception of some outright adventurers, ended up in Karabakh consciously, based on their own views and beliefs. By the way, some "convinced people" met on the Azerbaijani side, but they were in an insignificant minority against the backdrop of numerous and well-paid hired specialists: pilots, tankers, artillerymen.
Even less suitable for the role of mercenaries were a few Armenian volunteers from foreign countries, such as Monte Melkonyan (Avo), a native of the United States who became famous and died in the Karabakh war. After all, all of them, one way or another, were the descendants of the victims of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey and came to Karabakh to protect their compatriots from a similar fate that already threatened them.
After all, it would be naive to believe that if something like Sumgayit and Operation Koltso had happened to the Russian population of any CIS country, there would not have been Russian and Russian volunteers among the local combatants, right?
It is probably no coincidence that during the years of the Karabakh war, many women fought on the Armenian side, as well as veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Among the latter were almost twenty veterans of the 89th Armenian Taman division, which became famous during that war, the only national division that participated in the storming of Berlin.
The fate of Lieutenant-General Christopher Ivanyan seems to be the most surprising. A native of Tbilisi, Ivanyan finished World War II in Prague as a 25-year-old colonel, head of artillery in the 128th Infantry Division. Then there were a variety of military positions and places of service, the rank of major general. He was dismissed in 1978 from the post of commander of the rocket and artillery troops of the Trans-Baikal Military District. In fact, Ivanyan was fired for refusing to sign a document testifying to the important role of L. I. Brezhnev in the operation to liberate Kerch in 1944, for which Ivanyan himself deservedly received the Order of Suvorov, 3rd degree. And they collected the signatures of veteran generals of the Great Patriotic War on the eve of Brezhnev's award in the same 1978 with the Order of Victory, which was awarded to only a few people, including Joseph Stalin and Georgy Zhukov.
By the beginning of the Karabakh war, the military pensioner Ivanyan lived in Leningrad. In 1992, the 72-year-old major general went to Nagorno-Karabakh, where he personally took part in military operations, created an artillery training center, through which thousands of soldiers and officers went. After the Karabakh war, Lieutenant General Ivanyan commanded one of the brigades of the Armenian army for some time, being the oldest officer in the army and having retired at the age of 80. After his death in 2000, a settlement and a military sports lyceum in Nagorno-Karabakh were named after him.
Here is one of the many real stories that is hard to believe right away. Where are the man-made myths before it?
Meanwhile, the more years have passed since the end of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh war of 1991-1994, the more myths and tales are woven retroactively by forces that truly with devilish fury reject the realities that were formed by the will and fortitude of the people who threw off the chains of colonial slavery .

_____________________________

1 “Status of Nagorno-Karabakh in political and legal documents and materials”. Library of the Center for Russian-Armenian Initiatives. Yerevan: 1995, pp. 69-70
2 “In Zheleznovodsk – about Karabakh”, Izvestia, 09/23/1991.
3 Izvestia, November 22, 1991
4 “People need to be told why all this is happening,” Soyuz, No. 48, November 1991, p. 6
5 "Status of Nagorno-Karabakh in political and legal documents and materials". Library of the Center for Russian-Armenian Initiatives. Yerevan. 1995, pp. 88-89
6 Scientific notes, issue 2. Unrecognized states of the South Caucasus. Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov. Moscow. 2008, page 63
7 "Baku worker", 01/07/1992
8 T. Musaev, decree. article, p. 70.
9 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
10 Izvestia, November 28, 1991; A. Manasyan, "The conflict between Azerbaijan and the NKR in the legal context of the collapse of the USSR", "The Voice of Armenia", 07/16/1993
11 A. Manasyan, “The conflict between Azerbaijan and the NKR in the legal context of the collapse of the USSR”, “Golos Armenii”, 07/16/1993.
12 V. Stupishin. My mission to Armenia. Moscow. Academy. 2001, page 49
13 Izvestia, 06/19/1992
14 V. Mukhin “The Russian army hastily leaves Azerbaijan”, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12.08.1992.
15 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, November 17, 1992.
16 Izvestia, 09/08/1992
17 Izvestia, 06/04/1992
18 Zakharov V.A., Areshev A.G. Recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia: political and legal aspects, part 1. Moscow: International Humanitarian Foundation "Knowledge". 2008, p. 83.
19 Dzugaev K. South Ossetia: creating a miracle // Caucasian expert. 2006. No. 4. P. 21.
20 Russian Thought, Paris, April 10, 1992.
21 V.Kazimirov's interview to the PanARMENIAN.Net news agency, 17.09.2007.
22 http://www.nkr.am , 07.07.2008
23 Kommersant, November 29, 2007
24 A.V. Shishov. "Military conflicts of the XX century". Moscow: Veche, 2006, p. 521
25 N. Zenkovich. Ilham Aliyev. View from Moscow. Moscow: "Yauza" - "EKSMO", 2008, p. 448
26 “I am a humanist. In the Soul, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 2, 1992.
27 "New time", 06.03.2001
28 These excerpts are from Fatullayev's report published on the Real Azerbaijan website.
29 Sumgayit… Genocide… Glasnost? Yerevan. Tot. "Knowledge" of the ArmSSR. 1990, pp. 53-54
30 Michel Collon. Oil, PR, war. Crimean bridge-9d. Moscow. 2002. p. 11
31 Ibid., p. 13
32 Caroline Cox and John Eibner. "Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh".
33
34 Published on the website on 09.04.2007
35 From an interview with K. Cox to the newspaper “Voice of Armenia”, 07.04.2001.
36 Quoted from a reprint in the “Armenian Vestnik” newspaper, No. 9 (56), September 1993, p. 1
37 Express Chronicle, No. 9, February 26, 1991.
38 U. Harutyunyan subsequently died in the crash of an A-320 aircraft of Armenian Airlines near Sochi, May 3, 2006
39 “Pogroms in Armenia: judgments, conjectures and facts”, “Express Chronicle”, No. 16, 16.04.1991.
40 Ibid.
41 “Black garden. Armenia and Azerbaijan between peace and war. Moscow. "Text". 2005, page 97
42 Ibid., p. 13
43 The transcript of the transmission was published in the Baku Rabochiy newspaper, the administrative body of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, in issues dated March 27-30, 2001.
44 V. Stupishin. My mission to Armenia. Moscow: Academy. 2001, pp. 160-161
45 During the war, several mercenary pilots were taken prisoner. One of them, Ukrainian Yu. Bilichenko, who was sentenced to death, but then pardoned, was widely reported in the media of the Russian Federation.
46 V. Stupishin. My mission to Armenia. Moscow: Academy. 2001, pp. 61-62
47 Persian, or Farsi, is closely related to Dari, the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan.
48 Aftafah is a special vessel with an elongated narrow neck used in the Islamic East for personal hygiene.

After the collapse of the USSR, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic basically received each of their “own” parts of the former Soviet army, that is, they took what was on their territories.

Only a certain part of the rather powerful aviation group stationed in Azerbaijan was transferred to Russia.

After the collapse of the USSR, Azerbaijan received 436 tanks, 558 infantry fighting vehicles, 389 armored personnel carriers, 388 artillery systems, 63 aircraft, 8 helicopters. Armenia, at the beginning of 1993, had only 77 tanks, 150 infantry fighting vehicles, 39 armored personnel carriers, 160 artillery systems, 3 aircraft, 13 helicopters. At the same time, however, the armed forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) have become a "grey zone". Karabakh received some (albeit small) part of the equipment of the Soviet army (the former 366th SME), some of the equipment that was not taken into account was transferred to it by Armenia.

Despite the fact that the strength of the NKR Armed Forces was not exactly known, there is no doubt that by the beginning of the Karabakh war, Azerbaijan had a very significant superiority over the Armed Forces of Armenia and Karabakh. Moreover, part of the Armenian Armed Forces was involved in protecting the border with Turkey, which fully supported Baku; only the presence of Russian troops on the territory of Armenia prevented its direct intervention in the conflict.

Despite the superiority, Azerbaijan suffered a heavy defeat in this war. Not only almost the entire territory of the former NKAO (except for its insignificant part in the north), but also the adjacent regions of Azerbaijan itself came under Armenian control. The territory controlled by the Karabakh forces turned out to be very compact and convenient for defense. In the 15 years that have passed since the cessation of active hostilities, the border of this territory (that is, in fact, the front line) has been perfectly fortified, which was greatly facilitated by the mountainous terrain.

The parties suffered significant losses during the war in the early 1990s. Armenia admitted the loss of 52 T-72 tanks, 54 infantry fighting vehicles, 40 armored personnel carriers, 6 guns and mortars. The losses of Karabakh, of course, were unknown. Azerbaijan lost 186 tanks (160 T-72 and 26 T-55), 111 infantry fighting vehicles, 8 armored personnel carriers, 7 self-propelled guns, 47 guns and mortars, 5 MLRS, 14-16 aircraft, 5-6 helicopters. In addition, damaged equipment was written off to it: 43 tanks (including 18 T-72), 83 infantry fighting vehicles, 31 armored personnel carriers, 1 self-propelled guns, 42 guns and mortars, 8 MLRS.

At the same time, however, 23 T-72s, 14 infantry fighting vehicles, 1 self-propelled guns, 8 guns and mortars were captured from the Armenians. On the other hand, a significant part of the equipment lost by Azerbaijan was captured by the Armenian forces, either in full working order or with minor damage, and became part of the Armed Forces of Armenia and the NKR.

Over the past years, the Armed Forces of both countries have significantly strengthened. At the same time, Yerevan and Baku do not at all hide the fact that they are building their armies for the sake of a new war between themselves.

Armenia is a member of the CSTO and formally sent a company to the CRRF. However, due to the peculiarities of the geographical position (Armenia and Karabakh, which do not have access to the sea and do not border Russia, remain in a transport blockade from Azerbaijan and Turkey, there is almost no transit through Georgia), Yerevan cannot take a real part in the activities of this organization . The actual connection with the CSTO is carried out by the Russian 102nd military base, which is armed with, in particular, 18 MiG-29 fighters and an anti-aircraft missile brigade with S-300V air defense systems. The base acts as a deterrent against Turkey, preventing it from providing direct military assistance to Azerbaijan in the event of an almost inevitable resumption of the war over Nagorno-Karabakh.

What is the Armenian army

The ground forces of Armenia include 5 army corps (they include 13 motorized rifle regiments and several dozen battalions of various types), 5 motorized rifle, missile, artillery, anti-aircraft missile, radio engineering brigades, motorized rifle, self-propelled artillery, anti-tank artillery, special forces, communications, engineering and sapper, MTO regiments. Some units and formations are deployed on the territory of the NKR and adjacent Azerbaijani regions under Armenian control.

The armament consists of 8 R-17 launchers (32 missiles), at least 2 Tochka launchers, 110 tanks (102 T-72, 8 T-55), about 200 infantry fighting vehicles and infantry fighting vehicles, more than 120 armored personnel carriers, at least 40 self-propelled guns, at least 150 towed guns, more than 80 mortars, more than 50 MLRS (including 4 WM-80s: Armenia is the only country in the world, except China itself, that has this Chinese MLRS in service), up to 70 ATGMs, over 300 weapons Air defense (ZRK, MANPADS, ZSU).

Celebration of Military Intelligence Day in Yerevan, November 5, 2013. Photo: PanARMENIAN Photo / Hrant Khachatryan / AP

The size of the NKR ground forces is estimated. The most commonly used figures are "316 tanks, 324 armored combat vehicles, 322 artillery mounts with a caliber of more than 122 mm".

The Air Force and Air Defense are armed with 1 MiG-25 interceptor, 15-16 Su-25 attack aircraft (including 2 combat training Su-25UB), approximately 10-15 transport and training aircraft, 15-16 Mi combat helicopters -24, 7-12 multipurpose Mi8/17. SAM - 54 Krug launchers, up to 25 S-125 and S-75 launchers, 48 ​​launchers (4 divisions) S-300PT / PS. The Air Force and Air Defense of the NKR allegedly have 1 division of S-300PS air defense systems and Buk-M1 air defense systems, 2 Su-25 attack aircraft, 4 Mi-24 combat helicopters and 5 other helicopters.

Armenia has a little over 30 military-industrial complex enterprises that produce various devices and equipment, but not arms and equipment in its final form. During the post-Soviet period, some new types of small arms, the light N-2 system for firing rocket-propelled grenades, as well as the Krunk drone, were created here. In general, the country is completely dependent on arms imports.

For most of the post-Soviet period, the well-prepared and highly motivated Armenian army shared the title of the best in the former USSR with the Belarusian army. However, recently she has had problems similar to those in Belarus, connected with a lack of money. Because of this, there is practically no renewal of weapons and equipment. The fundamental difference between Armenia and Belarus is that if for Belarus the probability of the practical implementation of an external threat is less than 1%, then for Armenia it exceeds 90%.

What is the Azerbaijani army

The Azerbaijani Armed Forces, which are going to realize this threat, today, in terms of the pace of development in the post-Soviet space, perhaps, can even compete with Russia (of course, taking into account the difference in scale), significantly surpassing the rest of the armies of the former USSR. The country's huge oil revenues allow its leadership to seriously count on revenge.

The land forces of Azerbaijan, like the Armenian ones, include 5 army corps. They include 22 motorized rifle brigades. In addition, there are artillery, anti-tank, MLRS and engineering brigades.

Until this year, the ground forces of Azerbaijan were armed with 381 tanks (283 T-72, 98 T-55), about 300 infantry fighting vehicles and infantry fighting vehicles, more than 300 armored personnel carriers and armored vehicles, more than 120 self-propelled guns, about 300 towed guns, more than 100 mortars, up to 60 MLRS (including 12 "Smerch").

The country's Air Force is armed with 19 Su-25 attack aircraft and 15 MiG-29 fighters. In addition, there are 5 Su-24 front-line bombers, Su-17 attack aircraft and MiG-21 fighters, as well as 32 MiG-25 interceptors, but the status of these aircraft is unclear, since they are very outdated. There are also 40 L-29 and L-39 training aircraft that can be used as light attack aircraft. There are 26 Mi-24 combat helicopters, Mi-35Ms are coming (there will be 24), at least 20 Mi-8/17 multi-purpose helicopters.

Parade in honor of the Day of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan in Baku. Photo: Osman Karimov / AP

Ground defense includes 2 divisions of S-300PM air defense systems, as well as Barak air defense systems (Israeli-made), Buk, S-200, S-125, Kub, Osa, Strela-10.

Thanks to high incomes from oil exports, Azerbaijan is trying to create its own military-industrial complex with the help of countries such as Turkey, Israel, South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus. Our own samples of small arms have been created, licensed production of Turkish armored vehicles and MLRS, Israeli drones, and South African armored personnel carriers has begun. Today, the Azerbaijani military-industrial complex has entered the top five in the post-Soviet space in terms of its capabilities, although after the collapse of the USSR, its capabilities were almost zero.

Nevertheless, imports remain the main source of weapons for the country. And in recent years, Azerbaijan has suddenly become one of the leading countries in importing military equipment from Russia. It all started with the delivery in 2006 of 62 used T-72 tanks from the presence of the RF Armed Forces. And since 2009, there have been massive deliveries of the latest weapons made specifically for Azerbaijan. Among these deliveries (some have just begun) - 94 T-90S tanks, 100 BMP-3, 24 BTR-80A, 18 self-propelled guns 2S19 "Msta", 18 MLRS "Smerch", 6 flamethrower MLRS TOS-1A, 2 divisions of air defense systems S-300P, 24 Mi-35M attack helicopters, 60 Mi-17 multipurpose helicopters.

The list is quite impressive. Such an exclusive as TOS-1A is especially impressive. However, the T-90S, Smerch, Mi-35P will also greatly enhance the strike potential of the Azerbaijani army.

Previously, Ukraine was the main supplier of weapons to Azerbaijan. Baku purchased from her a total of 200 tanks, more than 150 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, up to 300 artillery systems (including 12 Smerch MLRS), 16 MiG-29 fighters, 12 Mi-24 attack helicopters. However, absolutely all of this equipment was supplied from the presence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, i.e. was made in the USSR. From a certain moment, such equipment ceased to be of interest to Azerbaijan, since it did not provide a qualitative superiority over Armenia. Kyiv is simply not capable of delivering new equipment. In Thailand, apparently, they still believe that they will receive fifty already paid Ukrainian Oplot tanks. But Azerbaijan is much closer geographically and, most importantly, mentally, to Ukraine. Therefore, Baku already understands that Oplot may be a very good tank, but Ukraine is not capable of organizing its mass production (more precisely, it is capable, but at such a low rate that it makes no sense).

Azerbaijan even bought new Ukrainian BTR-3s in a rush, but, having received 3 units, changed its mind and stopped purchasing. But Uralvagonzavod has no problems with mass production of the T-90S. The pace, though not Soviet, but quite acceptable. And it’s better to get a new Smerch from Motovilikhinskiye Zavody than a 25-year-old one from Ukrainian warehouses. So Azerbaijan has made a choice.

Russia has a commercial interest in the region

Russia also made a purely commercial choice. Baku pays money, but Yerevan does not. Therefore, Azerbaijan, and not Armenia, receives the latest technology.

In general, the total potential of the Armed Forces of Armenia and the NKR, taking into account the existing fortifications and the high combat qualities of the personnel, so far ensures the repulse of a strike from the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan (if Russia guarantees Turkey's non-intervention). However, the trends are not favorable for the Armenian side due to Azerbaijan's much higher economic opportunities. The latter already now has overwhelming air superiority, which is still compensated by the strong ground air defense of Armenia and Karabakh. Russian deliveries will provide significant superiority on land as well. In particular, TOS-1 and Smerch will be very useful for breaking into the defensive fortifications of Armenians in Karabakh.

As mentioned above, Armenia is a member of the CSTO, that is, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are obliged in case of war (at least if Azerbaijan starts it) to come to its aid. True, there is almost no doubt that in reality this will not happen. Moscow, because of oil and gas problems that do not allow it to seriously quarrel with Baku (after all, as already mentioned, it even supplies offensive weapons to Azerbaijan in very significant quantities), and in general because of its unwillingness to get involved in a serious war, will find an excuse for itself: Azerbaijan after all, it is not attacking Armenia itself, but the NKR, which is not recognized by anyone and is not part of the CSTO. At the same time, the fact that completely similar behavior of Georgia in 2008 - an attack on unrecognized South Ossetia - Moscow declared treacherous aggression will be "forgotten". The idea that other CSTO countries will come to the aid of Armenia is so absurd that it makes no sense to even discuss this issue.

On the other hand, Turkey will also not dare to fight because of the risk of a direct military clash with Russia (represented by its grouping in Armenia), although it may organize some kind of show of force near the Armenian border.

During the previous Armenian-Azerbaijani war, Iran showed very clearly what a chimera "Islamic solidarity" is by supporting not Muslim (moreover, Shiite) Azerbaijan, but Orthodox Armenia. This was explained by the extremely bad relations of Iran with Turkey at that time, the main patron of Baku. Now the Iranian-Turkish and Iranian-Azerbaijani relations have noticeably improved, but the Iranian-Armenian relations have not deteriorated at all. There is no reason to doubt that Iran will remain neutral, perhaps only more balanced than in the early 1990s.

The West will remain silent

As for the West, two opposing factors will act on its position - a powerful Armenian diaspora (especially in the US and France) and the exceptional importance of Azerbaijan for numerous oil and gas projects that are alternative to Russian ones. However, military intervention in the Karabakh war by the United States, not to mention the European countries, is in any case excluded. The West will only furiously demand that Yerevan and Baku stop the war as soon as possible. Just like Russia, by the way.

In this regard, it should be noted that the situation in Yerevan is absolutely hopeless. He can be offended as much as he likes at Moscow, which sells the latest weapons to Baku, but he does not have the opportunity to “change camp”. Russia will almost certainly remain neutral if Azerbaijan attempts to retake Karabakh, but is close to 100% likely to intervene if Armenia proper is under attack (whether Azerbaijan or Turkey strikes). Armenia does not have a single chance to receive direct military assistance from NATO under any development of events, and completely regardless of the depth of the "deflection" in front of the alliance. True, it is possible that not everyone understands this yet, and the lessons of the August 2008 war (that is, the sad fate of Georgia) are far from being learned by everyone. However, this is the reality.

Time works for Azerbaijan

In this regard, it is impossible not to comment on the words of the commander of the 102nd military base of the Russian Federation in Armenia, Colonel Andrei Ruzinsky, who said a month ago in an interview with Krasnaya Zvezda: “If the leadership of Azerbaijan decides to restore jurisdiction over Nagorno-Karabakh by force, the military base can enter into an armed conflict in accordance with the treaty obligations of the Russian Federation within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization”. This remark caused the strongest resonance both in Baku and in Yerevan. Meanwhile, the officer could not say anything else: the military base could come into conflict. If an order comes from Moscow, it will enter; if it doesn't, it won't. In general, these words are best understood as follows: Russia will fulfill its obligations within the framework of the CSTO if Azerbaijan touches the territory of Armenia itself. What no one really doubted.

Thus, just like a decade and a half ago, if a war starts, it will almost certainly go only between Azerbaijan on the one hand and Armenia and the NKR on the other. Azerbaijan does not yet have enough strength to guarantee itself a victory. However, time is definitely on his side. And that is why the war is currently more profitable for the Armenians. As long as the forces of the parties are comparable, they, having started the war first, can count on victory, i.e. on a very significant weakening of the military potential of Azerbaijan. Which then would have to be restored for at least 15-20 years.

However, this option has major downsides. Firstly, the Armenian side does not have any numerical superiority, therefore, it can achieve decisive success only if complete surprise is achieved, which is practically impossible to ensure. Secondly, the political consequences will be very difficult for the Armenians, because they will turn out to be aggressors attacking the territory, which from any point of view belongs to Azerbaijan. As a result, the Armenians will lose the political support not only of Iran, but, almost certainly, of Russia and the West, and will face the threat of direct Turkish intervention.

Therefore, the most profitable option for Armenia and the NKR is to somehow provoke Azerbaijan to attack first, and as soon as possible. Moreover, Baku’s “hands itch” very much, which may well make it seem that there are enough forces for victory right now. And since there are not enough of them yet, the Armenians, being in a military advantageous position defending in a well-equipped, prepared and long-studied position, will be able to solve the main task of the war - they will knock out the offensive potential of Azerbaijan. In addition, the second defeat will qualitatively worsen the political position of Baku in the struggle for Karabakh. NKR will then become from a completely unrecognized partially recognized country: at least, it will be recognized by Armenia itself.

Thus, there is a balancing act on the brink of war, which will begin sooner or later. But the Armenian side does not dare to start a war, which is psychologically and politically quite understandable. After some (and short) time, the opportunity will be completely lost, after which the initiative will completely pass to the Azerbaijani side. And the only option for Yerevan is to urgently raise money for armaments.