Five years ago, around these very days, a remarkable event took place. On December 1, 2020, the withdrawal of Armenian occupation forces from Azerbaijani territory was completed on the basis of the Trilateral Statement signed in the night of November 10 that same year.
This document, let us recall, was signed by President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, and Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan. However, while Ilham Aliyev and Vladimir Putin did so almost live on air, Nikol Pashinyan preferred to sign his country’s de facto capitulation far from television cameras and in a secret location. Under this document, the Armenian army was to withdraw from the Aghdam, Kalbajar and part of the Lachin district in parallel with the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh. Under the control of the Russian peacekeepers remained part of the former NKAO territory, which was immediately dubbed the “rump,” as well as the “Lachin corridor.”
Strictly speaking, from the very beginning of its Patriotic War Azerbaijan had been stating: we are ready to stop hostilities even today, if Armenia provides a clear timetable for the withdrawal of its troops from the occupied territories. In Yerevan, they were in no hurry to comply with this demand, hinting in every possible way that Armenia was ready to make concessions, but everything, they said, depended on what kind of concessions Azerbaijan itself was prepared to make… The timetable appeared only after the liberation of the city of Shusha, when Armenian forces in Karabakh found themselves in a fire trap.
Today it is already clear that many provisions of the Trilateral Statement were never implemented. The document already envisaged the opening of transit via the Zangezur corridor — this did not happen. In defiance of all agreements, Armenia continued to keep its military grouping in the “rump”: 15,000 personnel, hundreds of tanks and other armored vehicles, tube and rocket artillery systems, electronic warfare assets… Again in defiance of the agreements, the Russian peacekeepers failed to exercise proper control over transit through the Lachin corridor — conscripts were brought in, mines were transported, and they even managed to sneak in a French presidential candidate. But the “territorial” provisions of the deal still had to be implemented. And it is far from always duly acknowledged what a major strategic success Azerbaijan achieved at that time thanks to Ilham Aliyev’s grandmaster-level diplomacy. It was precisely in the Aghdam direction that Armenia had created its strongest defensive lines. In Yerevan, they believed that the Azerbaijani offensive would start from there in order to take Khankendi and Shusha by advancing along one of the main roads. The military liberation of the Kalbajar district also posed a very complex task. This district, let us recall, is wedged between the territory of Armenia and the former NKAO. The main road to Kalbajar ran through Agdere. An attack would most likely have had to go across the Murovdag ridge and the Omar Pass.
As was noted later, Azerbaijan did have relevant military plans and concepts. Already in the first days of the war, the Azerbaijani army took control of the summit of Murovdag, which made it possible to establish fire control over the Agdere–Kalbajar–Basarkechar (Vardenis) road. But let us be realistic: in any case, the liberation of these territories would have required great effort and heavy losses. The Kalbajar district is larger in area than the entire former Nagorno-Karabakh; it is an extremely difficult mountainous terrain. And the fact that these districts were returned to Azerbaijani control without a single shot being fired means that we managed to save hundreds or perhaps thousands of our soldiers’ lives.
Moreover, many of the “peace plans” put forward by the notorious OSCE Minsk Group went straight into the wastebasket. Under those plans, let us recall, the Kalbajar and Lachin districts were to remain under Armenian control for all practical purposes indefinitely. Azerbaijan, however, pushed aside the Minsk Group’s drafts and brought to the forefront the UN Security Council resolutions, which demanded the unconditional withdrawal of Armenian forces from Azerbaijani territory, including the Kalbajar district.
Finally, the loss of precisely the Kalbajar district became a real tragedy for Armenian experts. They had been insisting in every possible way that Kalbajar, which they had already renamed “Karvachar,” was “the key to Artsakh” and indeed to all of Armenia. One might have ignored this online activism, were it not for one circumstance: right up until the 2023 counter-terrorist operation, it was precisely there — on the Kalbajar section of the border — that Armenia staged provocations, testing the strength of Azerbaijan’s defenses and clearly eyeing a renewed occupation of this Azerbaijani district. The calculation was that the main road into Kalbajar was under the control of Russian peacekeepers, that Azerbaijan would simply not have time to deploy a sufficiently robust defense there, and that the troops already present would face logistical difficulties. It did not work out. On the contrary, it was Armenia that ended up losing its positions.
One could probably have stopped there. But there is one more point. Back then, after the signing of the Trilateral Statement, certain individuals on social media launched a full-blown hysteria over the deployment of Russian peacekeepers: “this is a new April 28,” “our victory has been stolen,” “if Russian troops have entered, they will never leave,” “the conflict has been frozen for another 30 years”… They preferred not to notice the fact that the peacekeepers were deployed for a fixed term of five years, and that the agreement was drafted in such a way that their withdrawal required only a decision by official Baku.
Five years have now passed since those events. During this time, Azerbaijan has carried out several brilliant positional operations. It thwarted attempts to expand the post-war zone of control of the Russian peacekeeping contingent. In 2022, without a single shot being fired, it returned the city of Lachin and the villages of Sus and Zabukh to its control. In 2023, an Azerbaijani border and customs checkpoint was established on the Lachin road. And in September 2023, Azerbaijan conducted lightning counter-terrorist operations that put a final end to the existence of the occupation junta in Khankendi. Under the leadership of its President Ilham Aliyev, our country fully restored its territorial integrity and state sovereignty across its entire internationally recognized territory. The Russian peacekeepers left Azerbaijan ahead of schedule.
This is how grandmaster diplomacy works when it successfully combines military, political, and diplomatic methods.
