Following the Soviet invasion of Azerbaijan 31 years ago, on January 16, 1990, when 11,000 troops were sent to quell the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, refugees from Azerbaijan began arriving in Ukraine by late January, Radio Moscow reported.
Refugees were provided with the barest essentials and were housed in military sanatoria, rest houses and hotels. A one-time money grant was given to each family as well as a document certifying that its members were refugees. In addition to refugees being settled in Kyiv, a large number of refugees were received in the city of Odesa.
The Soviet show of force was an indication that Moscow was losing its grip on power over the Soviet republics and observers noted that it also was a marker for Mikhail Gorbachev’s weakening power.
The centuries-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan had gone through periods of ebb and flow, and the Soviet weakness of the late-1980s allowed for ethnic rivalries to re-emerge. This conflict was in contrast when the Soviets deployed tanks and other military hardware to quell uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
During the 1990 Soviet operation in Azerbaijan, nearly 60 Armenians were killed in the initial maneuver, and when Armenia pleaded for support from Moscow, the Kremlin officials declared that the fighting in Azerbaijan was not a “civil war,” but merely “national strife.”
Mr. Gorbachev’s supporters voiced suspicion that the violence was being agitated by anti-Gorbachev activists to discredit the regime. The United States government supported Mr. Gorbachev’s action to deploy the military as a humanitarian response to the killings and terror. Over the next two years, the violence continued, and the weakened Soviet Union was unable to bring a lasting resolution to the situation before the Soviet Union collapsed and Mr. Gorbachev resigned from power.
The fighting, known as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which has stretched from 1988 to the present day, has its origins in the fallout from the First World War as empires collapsed and the self-determination of national identity began to emerge.
A ceasefire agreement was signed in 1994, which provided for two decades of relative stability, and the fighting reignited in April 2016 and lasted until November 2020, when the latest ceasefire agreement was reached.
President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has claimed that the conflict has ended, and the self-declared “Republic of Artsakh” that is claimed by Armenia remains recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Russian “peacekeepers” control the 5 kilometer-wide Lachin corridor, which is the only overland access route to Armenia. A major contributing factor in reaching the latest ceasefire, observers have noted, was the use of modern Turkish UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on the side of the Azerbaijanis that outclassed Russia’s latest military hardware and tactics.
Source: “Azerbaidzhan refugees arrive in Ukraine,” The Ukrainian Weekly, January 28, 1990.