Kremlin officials said on Wednesday that nearly 2,000 troops are withdrawing from Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region, POLITICO reports.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the withdrawal Wednesday, Russian media reported.
1,960 Russian soldiers were deployed in the region, along with hundreds of pieces of military equipment, under the terms of a 2020 ceasefire agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. They had a peacekeeping mandate until at least the end of 2025, but Moscow decided to withdraw its resources.
The mountainous region, located inside Azerbaijan’s international borders, has been governed by its ethnic Armenians as the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic since the war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, the Russian military did not intervene when Azerbaijan began a prolonged blockade of the region’s supply lines from December 2022, causing a humanitarian crisis. Moscow troops also retreated from their positions between the two sides last September, moments before Azerbaijan launched a surprise offensive to take full control of the breakaway region. Since then, virtually all of the 100,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh have fled their homes.
In December, Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, stated that “our military contingent continues to fulfil its tasks as a guarantor of the possibility of building a peaceful life and the return of residents to the region”. However, the mechanism by which refugees could return home has not yet been developed.
News of the troop withdrawal comes amid a growing rift between Armenia and its historic ally Russia. More recently, Yerevan has sought closer integration with the European Union. The South Caucasus country recently froze its membership in Russia’s CSTO military bloc and then held joint military exercises with the US.
