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Jamestown (15 May 2023)

Fuad Chirov

On April 23, Azerbaijan’s installation of a checkpoint along the Lachin road—the so-called “Miatsum road” (“unification road”)—can be considered the most significant tactical achievement for Baku since the end of the Second Karabakh War in 2020. Overall, the purpose of this checkpoint is to grant Azerbaijan complete control over the military and transit activities between Karabakh and Armenia. On April 30, the first images of Armenian cars passing through the checkpoint were released by the Azerbaijani media (Caliber.az, April 30). However, installation of the checkpoint seemed to be one of the primary reasons for the recent outbreak in fighting between the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides, which has threatened to derail recent European Union–mediated peace talks between Yerevan and Baku (Al Jazeera, May 12).

In March 2023, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev noted that, prior to the war in 2020, each settlement proposal from the former Minsk Group co-chairs (France, Russia and the United States) had approached Lachin differently, with Armenia considering the return of Lachin to Azerbaijan to be wholly unacceptable (President.az, March 28). This differed from Yerevan’s take on the five other formerly occupied districts adjoining the former “Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast” (Top-center.org, May 18, 2022).

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