Azerbaijan launches a lightning military offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh. One day after the offensive began, on September 20, an agreement was reached on the complete cessation of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh, brokered by the Russian peacekeeping command in Nagorno-Karabakh, three decades after a bloody conflict that left it in Armenian hands. Nearly 120,000 Armenians, virtually the entire population, leave Nagorno-Karabakh in two weeks. Along the Lachin Corridor—the only route from the region to Armenia—abandoned cars and belongings clutter the streets, having broken down or run out of fuel in the kilometers-long queue to leave. In the most recent clash, a 44-day war in 2020, approximately 7,000 soldiers and 170 civilians were killed and many more wounded, culminating in a Russian-brokered peace deal that returned seven districts to Azerbaijan but left a key part of the region under Armenian control: Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Azeris captured on September 19, 2023.
