Five years ago, a new date appeared on Azerbaijan’s calendar — November 8, the Day of Victory. The day the 44-day Patriotic War ended. The day of the unprecedented operation to liberate the city of Shusha — the assault launched from the cliffs of Dashalti.
It was more than a military success. Azerbaijan accomplished its greatest national goal — restoring its territorial integrity and ending the occupation of its lands. But above all, the country passed the hardest test of statehood and maturity. To this day, the victory in Karabakh remains the only precedent of its kind in the post-Soviet space. And Azerbaijan achieved it without external support. No “little green men” like the 366th regiment or the Pskov Airborne Division fought on our side. No one donated billions of dollars’ worth of weapons. No one guarded our borders or covered strategic directions to free up resources for the war. We fought with our own strength — and we won completely, unconditionally, and in a way unprecedented in modern history.
After November 8, 2020, President Ilham Aliyev’s truly grandmaster-level diplomacy began. Three districts — Aghdam, Kalbajar, and Lachin — were liberated without fighting. Operations “Farrukh,” “Gisas,” and “Gisas-2” followed. Azerbaijan regained control over strategic heights along the new line of contact. Then came the counter-terrorism operations of September 2023, which put an end to attempts to revive the separatist project in Khankendi and to prepare a new round of revenge, using the Russian peacekeepers’ zone of responsibility as a foothold.
Equally important was the often invisible diplomatic effort — neutralizing attempts to revise Azerbaijan’s military victory through political bargaining. And such attempts did occur. One only has to recall the Kremlin’s effort in Sochi to insert a “deferred status for Karabakh” clause into the talks. Recently, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov “laid the cards on the table,” revealing that on the eve of the November 10 agreement, Moscow had tried to impose a plan placing Russian peacekeepers together with Armenian troops on the Armenian side of the new line of contact and Russian peacekeepers with Azerbaijani troops on the Azerbaijani side — but the plan did not include the liberation of the occupied territories. For the first time in the post-Soviet space, the agreement on peacekeepers’ deployment was not indefinite.
Finally, in 2022, documents were signed in Prague in which Armenia was compelled to recognize Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. And this was not one of those “sign and forget” cases — that approach doesn’t work with Azerbaijan.
Today, five years later, the meaning of Azerbaijan’s brilliant victory in the war is revealed in a new light. The negotiations held in Washington in August of this year formally confirmed Azerbaijan’s military success on paper. The peace process now proceeds in accordance with international law and along the Azerbaijani “road map” — without any attempts to create “gray zones” or lingering pockets of separatism. The leaders of the former occupation regime now stand trial in Baku — a process already dubbed the “Azerbaijani Nuremberg Tribunal.” The world now addresses our country with respect. Azerbaijan’s authority and political weight have multiplied. And this very fact thwarts the new attempts to revive separatism under slogans like “the return of Karabakh Armenians with international security guarantees.” Azerbaijan has prevailed, restored its territorial integrity and sovereignty — and this is forever.
Even after five years, the memory of those 44 days remains vivid — the military reports, the tweets and addresses by the President, the maps with little flags marking our army’s advance, the fireworks lighting up the sky as we heard of the liberation of Jabrayil, Hadrut, Fuzuli, Zangilan, and finally the “crown of Karabakh” — the city of Shusha. We did not seize what was not ours. We reclaimed what belonged to us. We paid a terrible price for victory — 3,000 lives — but we did not leave war as an inheritance for future generations. We defended our country and our land.
Martyrs never die. The homeland is indivisible.
