It had been clinging on to its self-proclaimed status in the face of Azerbaijan’s aggression. Then, over a week, the entire population fled

On September 30th I watched the last few cars of Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh drive over the border into Armenia. In the space of a few days, their enclave within Azerbaijan had ceased to exist. Less than a fortnight before, on September 19th, Azeri forces had routed the positions of the Karabakh Armenians. After 30 years of failed negotiations and intermittent fighting, the final battle lasted one day. Then the entire population of 100,000 people fled. Two days earlier, the president of Nagorno-Karabakh announced that from January 1st 2024, Nagorno-Karabakh would cease to exist.

Now, as I looked out from the heights, the Lachin corridor, the sliver of road that connected Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, was empty. For five days it had been crammed with a traffic jam of cars, vans and tractors snaking 70km from Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, to the border. A troop of kids from the nearby village pointed out the Azerbaijani military positions on nearby ridges. There was no evidence of Armenian armed forces, not even a single sandbag. Several trucks full of Russian soldiers, who had supposedly been peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, rumbled past. Russia, Armenia’s traditional ally in the region, had not intervened to prevent the Azerbaijani attack.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2024/01/01/nagorno-karabakh-the-republic-that-disappeared-overnight