Republic of Artsakh

The Republic of Artsakh — better known to the outside world as Nagorno-Karabakh — was one of the longest-surviving unrecognised states of the post-Soviet world. It began as a late-Soviet campaign by the Armenian majority of an autonomous region inside Soviet Azerbaijan to join Armenia, and hardened into a self-declared republic when the USSR collapsed in 1991. The First Karabakh War left Armenian forces in control of the enclave and a belt of surrounding Azerbaijani districts, and for thirty years Artsakh governed itself from Stepanakert — with its own flag, parliament, and army — while no country on earth, not even Armenia, formally recognised it.

Its survival had always depended on Armenian protection and on a military balance that shifted decisively against it. Azerbaijan retook much of the territory in a six-week war in 2020, leaving the enclave dependent on a single mountain road, the Lachin corridor, watched by Russian peacekeepers. When that road was blockaded for nine months in 2022–23, the population was cut off from food, fuel, and medicine. On 19 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a two-day offensive; the Karabakh forces capitulated within a day, and within a week practically the entire ethnic-Armenian population — around 100,000 people — had fled to Armenia. With no one left to govern, the republic’s president signed a decree dissolving every state institution, and on 1 January 2024 the Republic of Artsakh formally ceased to exist, a polity that ended not with a treaty but with the departure of its people.