Armenians Remember Six Years Since the Start of the 2020 Artsakh War

On the morning of September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Artsakh, beginning a 44-day war that took thousands of Armenian lives. Six years later, Azerbaijan occupies indigenous Armenian Artsakh, and families who buried their sons still return to their graves.

For thousands of Armenian families, the anniversary is measured not only in years, but in lives that never returned from the battlefield.

Armenia’s Investigative Committee said this month that 3,833 people on the Armenian side were killed in the war — 3,755 servicemen and 78 civilians. The whereabouts of another 191 people, including 172 servicemen and 19 civilians, remain unknown.

The updated figures came after President Vahagn Khachaturyan said during a visit to Prague that 4,800 people had been killed. His office later said he had misspoken, while the Investigative Committee restated the official count.

The fighting continued through October and into November, despite several attempts to establish a ceasefire.

One of the decisive battles came around Shushi, a strategically important city overlooking Stepanakert. Azerbaijani forces took control of the city in the final days of the war.

The fighting ended under a statement signed by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The agreement took effect at midnight Moscow time on November 9, 2020.

Under its terms, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces stopped at the positions they then held. Azerbaijan retained the territories it had captured during the fighting, while additional districts were transferred to Azerbaijani control. A Russian peacekeeping force of 1,960 troops was deployed along the line of contact and the Lachin corridor, which at the time provided Nagorno-Karabakh’s main connection with Armenia.

The agreement stopped the 44 days of fighting, but it did not bring an end to the conflict or its human consequences.

Families continued searching for missing servicemen. Armenian prisoners remained in Azerbaijani custody. Thousands of people displaced from communities that came under Azerbaijani control had no homes to return to.

The fragile postwar order established in November 2020 would itself collapse less than three years later.

After months of restrictions on movement through the Lachin corridor, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in Artsakh on September 19, 2023. The authorities in the region agreed to disarm the following day, and within days virtually the entire ethnic Armenian population was forced to flee to Armenia.

For Armenians, the events of 2023 changed the meaning of the 2020 war as well. What began six years ago with trenches, air raid sirens and artillery ended years later with Artsakh emptied of its Armenian civilian population.

The memory of the 44-Day War remains most visible at Yerablur Military Pantheon in Yerevan, where rows of graves hold many of the young servicemen killed in 2020.

Every Sept. 27, parents return to their sons’ graves. Widows arrive with their children. Families bring flowers, light incense and stand beside photographs of young men whose lives ended during those 44 days.

Six years have passed since the first day of the war.

For the families who still come to Yerablur, September 27 has never really ended.

—

Support independent reporting from the region by subscribing to The Armenian Report. Our team is funded solely by readers like you.