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How did Azerbaijan’s blitzkrieg in Nagorno Karabakh go?

7 months ago babelfish

How did Azerbaijan's blitzkrieg in Nagorno Karabakh go?

Azerbaijan won a quick victory in Nagorno Kabarakh: Armenia was humiliated and Russia was accused of abandoning an ally. All the details

It was a real blitzkrieg that was launched by Azerbaijan on Tuesday and ended twenty-four hours later with the surrender of the secessionist forces of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh. At one o'clock yesterday the ceasefire came into force which marks the triumph of Azerbaijani president Aliyev and the simultaneous humiliation of Armenia and a Russia accused of abandoning its ally. Here are all the details.

Azerbaijan's attack

The Azerbaijani offensive began after months of fruitless negotiations between Baku and Yerevan to find a solution to the age-old problem of Nagorno Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijani territory which proclaimed itself as an independent republic causing two conflicts, the last of which, in 2020, it caused thousands of deaths.

An armed intervention by Baku had been in the air for some time and, thanks to the support of Turkey, aimed to regain the territory lost in the war of over thirty years ago.

On Tuesday, news of Azerbaijan's military operations aimed at triggering the "evacuation" of Armenians from the "dangerous area" of Nagorno Karabakh burst onto the scene.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said it had launched “local anti-terrorist activities” with the aim of “suppressing large-scale provocations” in that territory. From the images arriving from Stepanakert, the de facto capital of the separatist republic, the sound of the anti-aircraft alarm and the shots of the Azerbaijani artillery resounded loudly.

Panic was spreading through Armenia, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had urgently convened the country's Security Council and loudly called on the UN Security Council and Russia to take "clear and unambiguous steps" to end Azerbaijan's aggression.

The pressure of diplomacy.

In the hours following the start of hostilities, Azerbaijani President Aliyev was the subject of a diplomatic barrage through phone calls and messages from the main world chancelleries. Among the tweets launched on

The ceasefire

Twenty-four hours after the start of hostilities, the surrounded Nagorno Karabakh agreed to surrender and the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense made the ceasefire official starting from one in the afternoon yesterday. As Al Jazeera reports, news came from Aliyev's office of talks on the "reintegration" of Nagorno Karabakh into Azerbaijan to be held today in the city of Yevlka.

Also speaking to Al Jazeera, the spokesperson of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Aykhan Hajizada declared that "after the disarmament and withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces, peace will finally return to the region and the puppet regime will be dismantled".

As the BBC reports, in Yerevan in the meantime, thousands of people took to the streets outraged by the humiliating surrender and demanding Pashinyan's head.

On the other side of the border, Azerbaijani citizens were pleased to watch Aliyev's triumphant televised speech in which he reiterated that he had nothing against the Arena population, but rather against the "criminal junta" of Nagorno Karabakh, and that Azerbaijan wanted to integrate the population of the former republic and transform the region into a "paradise".

The fate of the approximately 120,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh remains unknown, while the shadow of the ethnic police looms.

The energy node

Those that passed between Tuesday and yesterday were hours of pure anxiety for Europe, which has very significant energy interests in Azerbaijan. In fact, from Azerbaijan, the southern gas corridor branches out which reaches all the way to Europe and which has allowed the latter, and Italy in particular, to draw on an alternative source to the now toxic one from Russia.

As written by Start Magazine , the corridor consists of two sections: the TANAP (Trans Anatolian Pipeline) and the TAP.

The TANAP starts from the Shah Deniz II field in Azerbaijan, passes through Georgia and then crosses all of Turkey up to the Greek border where it becomes TAP. The latter crosses northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic until it reaches Puglia, where it connects to the Italian gas distribution network, and also supplies Bulgaria and Greece in small quantities (1 billion m³ per head).

TAP has a transport capacity of 10 billion m³ per year, but is designed for potential capacity expansion up to 20 billion m³.

In 2021, Azerbaijan sent 8.1 billion m³ of natural gas to Europe. Last year, however, an agreement was signed in Baku, signed in the presence of the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, to bring supplies to the EU to 12 billion m³ by the current year with the The goal is to reach at least 20 billion by 2027.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/guerra-lampo-azerbaigian-nagorno-karabakh/ on Thu, 21 Sep 2023 06:06:30 +0000.