Armenia’s leaders believed it was their special connection to the land that secured their 1994 victory in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War against Azerbaijan. They thought they could win another one too, in 2020, pushing for maximalist demands while failing to obtain a reliable ally in either Russia or the West. They substituted diplomacy and military strategy with dreams of romantic nationalism.

In the Eighties, as the Soviet empire entered its death spiral, a movement for the rights of the majoritarian Armenians in autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh within Soviet Azerbaijan was gaining momentum. The Karabakh movement believed ethnic Armenians had a right to live on their ancestral land after years of harassment and discrimination. But the Soviet Azerbaijanis saw it as separatism, and a crackdown followed.

Rapidly spreading nationalisms turned neighbour against neighbour. In Azerbaijan, Armenians were killed in the streets in a series of pogroms. Homes were looted and victims were raped, murdered and burnt alive by mobs. When the USSR collapsed, in 1992 the two newly established nations declared war.

The Armenians prevailed, securing control over the region and forcing nearly half a million Azerbaijanis from the seven occupied districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the largest of several exoduses happening in both directions. And in 1994, after a ceasefire was agreed, the smaller, poorer, land-locked Armenia emerged victorious. Even though Armenia’s occupation of the seven districts was a violation of international law, all attempts at reconciliation failed. After years of mutual enmity, pogroms and atrocities on both sides, there was no trust left.

Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first President of independent Armenia and leader of the Karabakh movement, wanted to give the occupied territories back. But he was toppled in 1998 by hardline ministers who rejected the compromise. Nationalist ideas, brewing for decades, burst into the open and the new uncompromising rulers entered an alliance with the previously banned Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It said that the seven districts around Karabakh were historic Armenian lands; they had been liberated, not occupied.

 The Armenians’ “greatest error” was “to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a ‘Greater Armenia’ on territory emptied of the people who had lived there”, wrote the historian Ronald Grigor Suny. The irredentist ideology which was legitimised in the Nineties would be Armenia’s downfall.

Meanwhile, revisionism took over in both nations’ academia where the study of history was hijacked and “transformed into political ideology… to justify mass violence”. In Azerbaijan, “historians became soldiers of the head of state”. While their defeat in the war caused a wide-spread trauma among ordinary people, on the state level, it led to a policy of “systematic hatred towards Armenians”, according to a European Parliament resolution.

But if Baku’s defeat gave way to mass trauma and state-level hatred, Yerevan’s victory allowed for mass ignorance. Outside fringe nationalist groups, very few actively embraced the occupation. Many simply did not know their country was occupying lands whose pre-war population was majority Azerbaijani. A tiny minority of intellectuals on both sides, though, condemned their side’s atrocities and called for reconciliation. In response, Azerbaijan arrested the critics, and it continues to do so. In Armenia, peaceniks were simply ignored. Seen as hippie lunatics in a region where might makes right, they were dismissed by analysts convinced of their “pragmatic” interests and “realist” strategies.

But the irony is that self-proclaimed realists were promoting an irredentist fantasy. It is not just that there was never any moral justification for the occupation of the seven districts. There was never a chance Armenia would be allowed to get away with it. “Despite the diplomatic efforts of different administrations, the Armenian side never managed to get the international community to endorse its position,” the historian and diplomat Jirair Libaridian told me in 2020.

The political hardliners who had pushed Ter-Petrossian out soon realised there was no other choice but compromise. Serzh Sargsyan, a former Karabakh commander, was one of them. Once President in 2008, he engaged in serious negotiations and put forward a plan that would include an immediate return of five of the seven occupied districts. “I was ready to be labelled a traitor as long as I could solve the issue,” he told me in 2021.

The West and Russia were supportive of the plan, but Azerbaijan showed no interest. And before the deal was even put on the table, Sargsyan’s time was up. Mass opposition rallies paralysed the capital and forced him to resign. The leader of the protests, a little-known MP called Nikol Pashinyan, would win a landslide election. And he became the most popular leader in Armenia’s independent history — living in a modest flat and driving an old car, he appeared like a man of the people. His call for an anti-corruption crackdown appeared to herald a new era.

Internationally, he decided to do things differently, too. Appointing a failed cigar entrepreneur as his top foreign policy adviser, not only did he poke Russia left and right, but he endorsed the old Karabakh nationalism. Worse even, Pashinyan’s vision of the conflict was shaped by the nationalist propaganda of the old regime. He cited conspiracy theories promoted by his predecessor’s mouthpieces and led a rally under nationalist slogans in Karabakh itself. His cabinet sponsored construction in the occupied districts and threatened to take more of Azerbaijan’s lands.

There was little doubt as to what was coming next. While Azerbaijan was buying Bayraktar drones and holding unprecedented drills with the Turkish army, Armenia was oblivious of the sorry state of its own military. Moreover, Armenians believed that they would find support in the West, encouraged by such signs as the country of the year title bestowed upon them by The Economist. In the worst case, they hoped that Russia, as their formal ally, would forgive their trespasses and come to their rescue. But Armenia’s leadership was deluded.

In the war that followed, in the autumn of 2020, the Armenian army was all but annihilated. Azerbaijan managed to retake the seven occupied districts and around half of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, driving tens of thousands of its residents out. In just 44 days, up to 4,000 Armenians were killed. It is a percentage of population comparable to Ukraine’s losses in the ongoing war.

Unsurprisingly, Russia refused to interfere, and the West showed even less interest. In the end, Putin drafted a ceasefire agreement and dispatched 2,000 of his troops to serve as peacekeepers in what was left of Armenian-held Karabakh. And, three years later, with Russia distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan launched a military operation against the remainder of Nagorno-Karabakh. As the Armenian population fled, Russian peacekeepers stood by and so did the Armenian leadership.

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A century of tragedies culminated in this. “With the carelessness of inexperienced and ignorant men we did not know what forces Turkey had mustered on our frontiers,” Armenia’s first Prime Minister Kajaznuni wrote in 1923 of the fall of the first independent republic, and his verdict largely stands true today. The Armenian elites, Kajaznuni complained a century ago, failed to see that their cause “was an incidental and trivial phase for the Russians, so trivial that, if necessary, they would trample on our corpses without a moment’s hesitation”.

In April 2023, Pashinyan made a similar confession. He told the Parliament he was “guilty of not surrendering lands”, a decision that “resulted in thousands of victims”. After presiding over a defeat, he was disabused of nationalist notions and said he would pursue “a peace agenda”.

But a year after the fall of Karabakh, the peace between the two neighbours still has not materialised. With the tables now fully turned, Azerbaijan has little incentive to compromise. It is both stronger militarily and more important globally, with its oil reserves and natural gas deals with both Russia and the EU, as well as close cooperation with Israel.

In Turkey, Azerbaijan has a powerful and steadfast ally, something that Armenia lacks altogether. Whatever hopes it put in Russia, the fall of Karabakh buried them for good. But its dramatic turn to the West is a bold and dangerous gamble: overly dependent on Russian money, tourists, and natural gas, Armenia is playing a risky game.

Meanwhile, nationalist dogmas still dominate the conversation. For many, the role that the occupation and mistaken policies played in Armenia’s troubles are still taboo. Instead, the government blames everything on Russia, hoping to find a sympathetic audience in the West. Some point to the Biden Administration’s broken promise to prevent the expulsion of Armenians from Karabakh, while for others the European Union is to blame for cosying up to Baku and its gas exports. Finally, many are bitter with Israel, as it became a leading arms supplier to Azerbaijan in recent years. But very few mention Armenia’s hubris.

Over the past 30 years, various options safeguarding Armenian presence in Karabakh were on the table, but they were never good enough. “Freedom or death — we did not see a different option. So we chose death,” wrote the journalist Tatul Hakobyan. And, for small nations tempted by the phantoms of a glorious past, that should sound a warning.

But now, on the other side of that lonely road, lies a construction site. “There will be 38 buildings here, with over a thousand apartments,” Araz Imanov, a senior advisor to the Azerbaijani president, tells me. They will provide homes for people internally displaced in the Nineties. The project is part of a huge, government-led reconstruction effort — one that could serve as a blueprint, when the time comes, for the rebuilding of Ukraine.

Even after peace is declared, the scars of war zones make them hard to rebuild. A dozen or so metres from the edge of the road, there are signs warning of the presence of landmines — a legacy of the illegal military occupation of the town, which only ended after the Second Karabakh War in 2020. “That’s why it took us a long time, almost a month, to get in,” Imanov says.

When the authorities finally found safe passage into the town, they discovered houses that no longer had roofs, window frames or doors. They had been torn apart by hand rather than artillery. Everything, down to the copper wiring, was stripped away by occupiers and shipped over the border to Armenia, to be sold as building materials. The most well-preserved building is a former publishing house with an ornate doorway, flanked by two stone columns: a reminder of how culture, and commerce, used to flourish here.

“For 30 years, the Armenians claimed that these territories belonged to them,” says Imanov with a hint of sarcasm. The areas were given new Armenian names, and “their prime minister made statements claiming that they’re not even a separate territory but a part of Armenia itself. Yet this is the way that they treated the lands that they claimed to be their own.”

Azerbaijan’s intentions, however, couldn’t be more different. Cities that were destroyed in the first war will be rebuilt from scratch. Domestic refugees — of which there are 650,000 — will be given fully-furnished homes financed by the state, free of charge. Private sector businesses will be incentivised to invest in what the Azerbaijanis call “the liberated territories” — an area roughly equivalent in size to the state of Qatar — with tax breaks and customs duty exemptions. Dubbed “The Big Return”, this is a huge nation-building mission comparable to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

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Already, the progress made since the end of the war is remarkable. In April, when I visited Karabakh, only the skeletal outlines of the new apartment blocks had begun, but on the edge of town, the glistening Fuzuli International Airport is already in operation. Construction began just two months after the end of the Second Karabakh War, in January 2021; by September that year, it had already accommodated its first test flight. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles of newly-asphalted roads have been built in the formerly occupied territories. A railway linking Karabakh to the capital, Baku, which sits on the shores of the Caspian Sea, is already under construction.

The largest urban settlement in the liberated territories is Aghdam. Before the First Karabakh War, it was home to around 37,000 mostly ethnic Azeri population people. Nowadays, it’s known as “the Hiroshima of the Caucasus”, because it looks like it’s been hit by a nuclear bomb. The Azerbaijani government plans to rebuild the town from the ground up because the ruination is so total that there is nothing left to salvage. The same is true of Ukrainian cities including Bakhmut and Mariupol, which might one day be inspired by The Big Return.

Before anything can be built on newly liberated land, though, that land needs to be free of explosives. Decades of military occupation by Armenian forces turned south-western Azerbaijan into one of the most heavily landmined territories on the planet; according to the Halo Trust, “there have been more landmine accidents per capita in Karabakh than anywhere else in the world”. However, Ukraine is now in danger of taking this unfortunate title. Last September, the Ukrainian government estimated that 160,000km² of land may be “contaminated” by landmines and other unexploded ordnance — an area more than 13 times the size of the entire liberated territories of Azerbaijan.

“After the war, people wanted to go back to see their villages or visit cemeteries, and this is when the majority of [landmine] accidents happened,” says Samir Poladov, the deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action [ANAMA]. Founded in 1998, the agency both trains minesweepers and teaches the local population to avoid landmines, using everything from dogs to drones to locate them, Soon, it will begin using giant African rats, which have been trained to sniff out explosive substances.

Yet even with all of these cutting-edge methods, the mine-clearing process is incredibly slow, because the Armenians have largely failed to supply Azerbaijan with maps marked with their locations. “Every square metre might potentially be dangerous,” says Poladov. “The best approach is to be like: okay, everything is mined, the only non-mined territories are the ones that have been cleared.” Azerbaijan reclaimed some 11,700km² of territory in 2020 and, in the first year of operations, cleared a little over 500km² of landmines. For context, de-mining Ukraine at that rate would take over three centuries.

Nevertheless, ANAMA provides a useful model for how Ukraine can deal with its landmine problem once the war is over. As part of the Big Return programme, Azerbaijanis who have been internally displaced since the Nineties, and who wish to return to their former homelands, have the option of applying to the agency for mine clearance training. After they successfully complete it, they are offered jobs with the agency and posted to the liberated territories. “They’re clearing their own land,” says Poladov. “They’re doing this job for themselves.”

The workers are motivated, then, but they are also cheap. “If we didn’t have this agency, our government would have to outsource this to international companies,” says Poladov, “which would be 10 times more expensive.” Instead, Azerbaijan has become a world leader in mine clearance: Poladov regularly shares his expertise at international conferences.

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There has been a great deal of debate about how the funds set aside by the European Commission to rebuild Ukraine should be distributed, given the corruption that has plagued the country. Western donors fretting that funds might be misspent by government authorities could alleviate their fears by financing Ukraine’s very own version of ANAMA. Because not only is de-mining the unavoidable first step in the long process of reconstruction, but employing Ukrainians to do it would also help frame national renewal as an empowering, patriotic mission.

Citizens invariably want to help rebuild. “After the war, I felt like I must do something for my country,” a young Azeri teacher tells me. She’s based in the town of Agali, which is located in the deep south-western corner of Azerbaijan, nestled between the borders of Armenia and Iran. It is the first urban settlement in the region to welcome back returnees that had been displaced in the Nineties; the first batch arrived last July. As of April this year, Agali is home to roughly 420 people who make up 86 families, all of which live free-of-charge in the several-dozen houses that have been built here at the state’s expense over the past two years.

The teacher I spoke to is one of the few residents who is not a returnee. She grew up on the other side of the country, in a military family; her patriotic duty drove her to apply for a teaching job in Agali. “People younger than me died [in the war],” she says. “The whole people feel a duty to do something with this land. That’s why we want to come here.”

Agali looks and feels like a plush gated community built around a suburban shopping centre. Driving past street after street of identikit, two-storey houses with white walls and green roofs, visitors will arrive at a centre that includes a well-stocked supermarket, bank and a restaurant serving Azerbaijani classics. Nearby is the school where our tour guide works, built to accommodate 360 students, which opened last September and still smells of freshly laid paint.

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“We lived in [the town of] Sumqayit, but we always carried a wish to return to our land,” one man in his early sixties tells me. He’s standing outside his identikit house with his wife and teenage son. “When we finally came back for the first time and received this place, we were moved.” The man’s family were forced to flee in the first war. Since returning, they’ve been employed as drivers for none other than ANAMA: their days are spent ferrying around de-mining experts, their equipment and the scraps of de-fused explosives that get unearthed from the surrounding land.

Rather than simply rebuilding what was once here, state urban planners have taken the opportunity to improve on the past. Agali is fully WiFi connected and entirely energy self-sufficient. Solar panels are fitted to the buildings and a hydroelectric dam has been built on a nearby river. Settlements under construction across the liberated territories will likewise be equipped with green technologies. Azerbaijan is rising from the ashes as a nation of the future, ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

It is a path that Ukraine could follow. Prior to the Russian invasion, the country had been held back by a sclerotic post-Soviet economy. Many Ukrainians have fled to more advanced economies — a million to Germany alone. To entice them to return, and to stem future brain drain, the new Ukraine, built on present-day battlefields, will need to be thoroughly modern. By the time Kyiv is ready to start thinking about making plans, The Big Return to Karabakh should be complete. Then, Azerbaijan’s own hard-won experiences can be put to good use, helping to rebuild a war zone.

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan have been rising since the start of the year. In March, the latter became the first country with a Shiite Muslim majority to open an embassy in Israel. Iran, having the largest Shiite majority of any nation, and being Israel’s historic geopolitical nemesis, did not approve. Nor did it approve, in 2020, when Israeli-made Harop drones proved crucial in helping drive the Azerbaijani military towards victory over Armenia in the shockingly underreported Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Ties between Israel and Azerbaijan have grown increasingly close, and with Russia — traditionally the dominant regional power in the Caucasus — distracted by its engagement in Ukraine, Tehran fears that the balance of power is shifting in favour of Iran’s enemies.

Specifically, the Iranians are concerned that Azerbaijan might allow the Israeli military to use its territory as a launch pad — just as America feared Russia’s use of Cuba in the Cold War. The Azeris ruled out the possibility in March. But this has done little to calm tensions. Since January, a series of confrontations has driven relations between Iran and Azerbaijan to an all-time low that some fear could place them on the path to war.

Fazil Mustafa is a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, and one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of Iran. The day before his nation opened its new Tel Aviv embassy, he was shot in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Mustafa survived the assassination attempt, which the country’s foreign ministry appeared to blame on Tehran. Following his discharge from hospital, he emailed me to say there should be little doubt as to who orchestrated the attack against him. “All the suspicion and evidence obtained points directly to Iran,” wrote Mustafa, “because it doesn’t seem likely that such an act could have been committed against me from another source.”

It is difficult to independently verify these claims, which Iran denies. But, if true, it would be the second time this year that the country has attacked an Azerbaijani political target. In a separate incident, on January 27, a gunman stormed the country’s embassy in the Iranian capital, killing its head of security and wounding two others. Baku quickly suspended its diplomatic mission in Tehran and recalled its staff, although its consulates in other Iranian cities remained open. Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, has since blamed the Iranian government for the embassy attack. Tehran claims that the gunman was driven by “personal motivations”.

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A long history of enmity lies behind this tense relationship between the two nations. Although they both have predominantly Shiite populations, the Azeris are a Turkic people and Azerbaijan’s ethnic ties to Turkey have underpinned its foreign policy ever since it regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Republic of Azerbaijan’s founding president, Heydar Aliyev (father of the current leader), has previously described Azerbaijan and Turkey as “one nation, two states”. This irritates the Iranians, as Tehran sees Ankara as a regional rival.

Relations are further complicated by Iran’s marginalisation of its large Azeri minority. More ethnic Azeris live within Iran’s borders than in Azerbaijan itself: the community is estimated to number anywhere between 15 and 40 million people. They are the second-largest ethnic group in Iran, and are treated with great suspicion by the national government, which fears Azeri secessionism in the country’s North-West.

Iran accuses Azerbaijan of stoking separatist sentiment in the country, which Baku denies. But this has done little to calm nerves in Tehran. It was a similar — and similarly widely-ignored — geopolitical paranoia that drove Russia to invade Ukraine last year.  A failure to treat the Iranian threat more seriously could have similarly devastating consequences.

The more recent antagonism between Azerbaijan and Iran can largely be attributed to the changing geopolitical realities in the Caucasus since the brief war over Karabakh in 2020. Recognised as the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan under international law, Karabakh is home to a large ethnic Armenian minority and was illegally occupied by the Armenian military for more than a quarter of a century before being reclaimed by Baku. The 44-day conflict was suspended by a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement, but a formal peace treaty has yet to be signed. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were reported to be resuming talks in Brussels at the weekend.

Tehran enjoys close relations with Armenia, a nation often considered part of “Greater Iran”. Azerbaijan’s victory in Karabakh was, therefore, a setback for both nations: Azerbaijan reclaimed control over part of the highway that links Iran to Armenia, which is a critical trade route that also connects Tehran to the Black Sea and Russia. Azerbaijan has already imposed a steep tax on Iranian trucks carrying goods to Armenia, which it accuses of supplying separatists in Karabakh. Mustafa claims that, as a result of this new threat to its interests, Tehran is actively trying to sabotage the peace process in Karabakh.

“Iran is trying to conduct a very active policy in the South Caucasus. It acts with the idea of filling the vacuum created in the region after Russia’s war with Ukraine,” he writes. “Although Iran does not have the ability to influence the processes in the entire South Caucasus, it has made attempts to hinder the achievement of stability in the region and the conclusion of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.” Indeed, it is possible that Iran might provide military support to ethnic Armenian separatists; recent reports suggest that Tehran might supply this nation of “Greater Iran” with the same suicide drones it provided Russian forces in Ukraine.

Emboldened by its military victory in Karabakh — and a stockpile of high-grade Israeli arms — Baku appears unlikely to back down. Further escalation is possible, if not probable. Azerbaijan also knows that it can also rely on the support of its main ally, Turkey. The two countries have a mutual defense agreement in place and, assured by its membership of Nato, Ankara is unlikely to shy away from supporting the Azeris against the Iranians. Were that to occur, Moscow would feel obliged to step into the conflict. It is this risk of entanglement that makes the current standoff so dangerous.

Geopolitical alliances are key to preventing conflicts. They give smaller nations a degree of security against the threat posed by their larger, more malevolent neighbours. However, they can also have terrible consequences. They can cause a conflict to quickly cascade, as was the case in the Balkans in 1914: the Archduke was shot by a Bosnian Serb, which led to a standoff between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that later dragged in Russia before exploding into a world war.

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There are a number of reasons why there is a real danger of this in the Caucasus: unlike in Ukraine, where both regional and global powers have refrained from intervening directly against a nuclear-armed Russia, neither Turkey nor Iran are restrained by the danger of mutually-assured destruction. Israel, as a responsible actor that often operates by stealth, wouldn’t use a warhead against the Iranians. And, if Turkey’s military adventurism in the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, and northern Iraq, is anything to go by, Ankara looks unlikely to abandon one of its closest allies.

At the same time, a full-scale war between regional powers in the south Caucasus remains a worst-case scenario, says Michael Doran, the director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. “The likelihood of a direct military confrontation is probably limited,” Doran told me. “If a war were to actually break out between Azerbaijan and Iran it would risk bringing in Turkey and Israel against Iran and that, as a military alignment against Iran, is probably the thing Iran fears most.” Tehran would not be able to compete with their combined strength.

Tehran will also be hesitant to escalate the confrontation for fear of provoking an internal backlash from its Azeri minority. What’s more likely is that Iran will utilise more covert tactics to strike at Azerbaijan — tactics that give Tehran a degree of plausible deniability. It has form on this front, Iran has long used proxies to pursue its regional goals, most famously Hezbollah in Lebanon; it supports similar radical Shia elements in Azerbaijan. Mustafa claims that “Iran has allocated major funds for the spread of religious fundamentalism in the South Caucasus … it tries to use mosques, different groups, communities and individuals” to achieve these aims.

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With so much international attention focused on the war in Ukraine, this standoff in the south Caucasus has largely flown under the Western radar. Doran is particularly scathing of America’s failures to support the Azeris against Tehran: “This administration in Washington is not viewing Azerbaijan as a counter-balance to Iran,” he says. “That’s because it isn’t looking to counter Iran in any significant way, which is unfortunate.” America has not learned any lessons from Syria, where its failure to properly commit to intervention left the door open for Russia to step in and help Bashar al-Assad cling onto power.

But a war in the south Caucasus could set off a unfortunate chain of events. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan has emerged as a key alternative energy supplier to the EU: between 2021 and 2022, Baku’s gas exports to Europe increased from eight billion cubic meters to an estimated 11.5 billion, and that number is expected to rise to 20 billion by 2027. A military conflict would drastically damage Baku’s production and export capacity. Without Azerbaijan’s oil, European sanctions against Russia might become untenable. In other words, a conflict in the south Caucasus would strengthen Moscow.

Modern warfare is rarely an isolated battle between two states: it is to understand this fact that we teach the First World War. And what was true in the 20th century is even more true now, when our interconnected global economies allow the shockwaves of war to reverberate far away from the frontline. The energy crisis that arose in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine is a vivid recent example. From Washington, London, or Brussels, the Iran-Azerbaijan border might seem like a distant Eurasian hinterland — as the Donbas once did. But it is time we accepted that a faraway war can very quickly come home.