Gabriel Gavin covered the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh for POLITICO, and the following excerpts are taken from his forthcoming book on the conflict, “Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Ruben Petrosyan was getting ready for work when he heard the first explosion.
The father of three had a desk in the unassuming office building that housed Nagorno-Karabakh’s security services. For weeks, he and his colleagues had known something big was coming. They knew it when their wives came back empty-handed after lining up at the shops for rations of bread and sour cream. They knew it when troops on the contact line spotted a massive Azerbaijani build up. And they knew it on Tuesday September 19, 2023, when the war started.
Minutes before the first barrage began, up in the hills, volunteers and conscripts serving in the Nagorno-Karabakh Defence Army began noticing that the Russian peacekeepers who stood between them and enemy lines were jumping into vehicles and leaving in a hurry. Across the dusty gulf of no-man’s-land, they could see camouflage netting being pulled off Azerbaijani military hardware and ambulances lining up on the asphalt roads leading to the positions opposite, flanked by barbed wire and landmines.
Ruben’s wife, Nouné, had taken their two girls to the dentist. He grabbed his jacket and ran out of the house to go and pick them up. An air raid siren was ringing out all over the city, families were racing to the shelters, shops pulling down their metal shutters. The streets were a picture of chaos and confusion, the roads choked with parents trying to pick up their children from schools and kindergartens across town. Ruben found his family, took them to a shelter under a church next to the security services building, then went into work. They didn’t know it yet, but Nouné and the children would spend the next six days there.
As the Russians abandoned their posts — reneging on their pledge to protect the breakaway region following a war in 2020 — Nagorno-Karabakh’s troops dug in for what would be the final battle in three decades of fighting over the territory, inside Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognized borders but held by Armenian separatists since the fall of the Soviet Union. Within a week, local forces had been overwhelmed and the entire population was packing its bags to flee, taking what few possessions they could pack into cars or strap on the top of buses as they did.
The violent end of Nagorno-Karabakh may have been a sign of Russia’s diminishing influence as a result of its catastrophic invasion of Ukraine, but it was a personal defeat too for the then-president of the European Council, Charles Michel. At the same time as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was negotiating new fossil fuel deals with Baku, the bloc’s frequently sidelined other leader was trying to take on the role of mediator in the country’s conflict with Armenia.
The mild-mannered Belgian, an ex-prime minister, was theoretically in charge of the EU’s foreign policy but, in practice, spent his time picking individual issues to weigh in on. For nearly two years, whenever journalists reached out to Michel’s office with queries about some aspect of European affairs, they were batted away with a simple answer: He was busy trying to prevent a war in the South Caucasus.
Eyeing the power vacuum created by Russia’s strategic collapse in its former imperial hinterlands, this was an opportunity for the EU to step up, bolster its influence and replace Moscow’s brutal realpolitik with values-based humanitarian considerations. But, despite efforts to build relations with both sides, Michel’s campaign suffered from a fundamental failure to understand who he was dealing with — or how high the stakes were.
If Armenia and Azerbaijan were talking, the Eurocrats concluded, at least it meant they weren’t shooting at each other. But, in reality, they were doing both. The near-daily clashes claiming hundreds of soldiers’ lives along the line of contact continued unabated, and EU officials, determined not to lose their role as impartial facilitators, refused to comment on who was to blame. Whenever there was even a hint of criticism aimed at Baku, Azerbaijan’s most prominent commentators would loudly warn that the EU was losing its perceived neutrality.
To speak to officials in Brussels was to enter a parallel universe where everything was moving in the right direction. Careful diplomacy was the only way to prevent misunderstandings, they had opined in 2022, when Azerbaijan launched its Two Day War against Armenia. The talks were really promising, they insisted a few months later, as the blockade began and people started to starve.
Peace, they maintained, had never been closer—just as it seemed more than ever like another war was on the cards. Every move Azerbaijan made to bring about the inevitable showdown shifted the frame of reference for diplomacy; they might have imposed the blockade but they’ve at least now agreed to let the Red Cross operate, so that’s a positive development, the thinking went. Baku was taking three steps forward and winning plaudits whenever it moved a millimeter back.
The heart of the problem was that the people in the room simply weren’t qualified to deal with the conflict they had waded into. Wars in and around Europe for almost the entire post-World War II history of the continent had been dealt with either by individual member countries, by the U.S. or, more recently, by NATO. There simply wasn’t the institutional knowledge or understanding of how to conduct this kind of high-stakes foreign policy among officials in the European Council or the European External Action Service.
In the arena of Western politics where they’d cut their teeth, the worst imaginable outcome was that a poorly phrased missive might rile an EU country’s prime minister or upset an industry lobby group. Now, they’d inserted themselves into a bitter ethnic dispute where the worst thing that could happen was somebody burning down your house and cutting your head off. That was simply unimaginable for career diplomats who put total faith in the idea that no problem was too big to be sorted out over a plate of sandwiches in a Brussels meeting room.
And while the EU had been represented in talks over other international crises, like the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War, it had played second fiddle to more serious diplomatic services like those of the US, France and Britain. Now, Brussels thought it had what it took to run the show.
That paradigm counted doubly for Michel. His team constantly talked up his credentials as the former prime minister of Belgium. But being at the helm of a tiny Western European nation with no notable active foreign policy conflicts or international disputes did not instantly turn a lifelong centrist politician into a titan on the world stage. Worse still, he wasn’t even a titan in his own office.
As European Commission president, von der Leyen wielded far more practical power than Michel did in his largely symbolic role. And she was set on doing her gas deal with Baku, no matter whether it compromised Michel’s ability to act as a mediator or not. The pair had a famously fractious relationship, both vying to position themselves as the true owner of key issues like foreign affairs. In 2021, during a joint meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, von der Leyen was visibly shocked when her Belgian colleague darted in to grab the only available chair opposite the Turkish president, relegating her to a nearby couch.
But, as the offensive began, triggering the mass exodus from Nagorno- Karabakh, Michel dropped what had been his flagship issue faster than anyone could have expected. Apart from an initial call for restraint and respect for the rights of the Karabakh Armenians on Twitter, he almost never again commented on the issue publicly.
Through the 24 hours of fighting, and the four days of chaos and uncertainty that followed, those in the Nagorno-Karabakh security services had tried to do their jobs as best they could, coordinating the response and tracking the enemy troops getting closer and closer to the capital. Now they’d done all they could. Ruben Petrosyan had left the office to try and gather what he could from his house, in a suburb where there had been sightings of Azerbaijani forces.
There was a suitcase by the door, stuffed with all the pictures Nouné had taken down off the walls, along with documents and some essentials for their children. It had been there since after the 2020 war. Now, friends, cousins and colleagues were ringing around desperately trying to work out how to make their escape. The Facebook pages and message groups that they’d used to swap scant supplies during the blockade suddenly lit up again.
“Doesn’t anyone have two litres of petrol? That’s how much it should take to get to Kornidzor.”
“Who has a truck that can carry furniture? I can pay.”
“Is anyone from Berdashen village? My mother lives there and I can’t get in touch with her.”
Already having been let down by Russia, the murderous, disinterested state that had once claimed to be their ally, other Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians began wondering whether they had been truly left to fend for themselves. After 24 hours on the road fleeing his homeland, a 58-year-old former security guard called Spartak had some questions of his own.
“Everyone is saying they care about us, but where are they?” he asked, sitting in the leafy garden of a hotel serving as an emergency shelter. “Where is France? Where is America? Where is Charles Michel?”
Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the `Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh is published Jan. 9, 2025, by Hurst and Oxford University Press.