The Republic of Artsakh, internationally known as Nagorno-Karabakh, was one of the most durable unrecognised states of the post-Soviet era. Nestled in the mountains between Armenia and Azerbaijan, its modern struggle began in 1988, when the region’s overwhelmingly Armenian population petitioned to secede from Soviet Azerbaijan and join Armenia.

Protests, pogroms, and armed clashes quickly turned the local autonomy issue into an inter-ethnic war. After the USSR collapsed, Artsakh’s deputies declared independence on 2 September 1991, confirming it by referendum three months later.  During the 1992–1994 Karabakh War, Armenian forces seized control of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent Azerbaijani territories, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes. A Russian-brokered ceasefire left the new republic functioning in practice as an independent state with its own army, legislature, and presidency—though entirely reliant on Armenia for security, trade, and finance. For nearly thirty years the entity maintained a quiet, semi-frozen existence: unrecognised internationally but able to elect governments, host NGOs, and cooperate with other de facto states through the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations.  The balance shattered in 2020, when Azerbaijan, armed with Turkish drones and Israeli missiles, retook most of the territory in a six-week offensive. A brief Russian peacekeeping deployment could not halt renewed Azerbaijani pressure, and in September 2023 a final lightning assault forced Artsakh’s capitulation. Within days, nearly the entire 120 000-strong Armenian population fled to Armenia, ending three decades of de facto independence.

The republic formally dissolved itself on 1 January 2024, but its story endures as a cautionary chronicle of how self-determination movements born from empire’s collapse can survive—and ultimately fall—between the cracks of geopolitics.