THE ARTSAKH WEEKLY REPORT YEREVAN DELETES ARTSAKH FROM STATE POLICY BABAYAN: HOSTAGES LEFT TO DIE IN BAKU BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO TOUR OCCUPIED SHUSHI
TOP ARTSAKH HEADLINES, AUGUST 17-23, 2026
State Erasure: Yerevan’s 2026–2031 Program Writes Artsakh Out of the Republic
In parliamentary debates on the Armenian government’s 2026–2031 program, Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, revisited his own, now infamous, 2019 declaration that, “Artsakh is Armenia, period!” and attempted to recast it as a so-called device for “opening the curtain of our history.” What this “curtain” being opened supposedly revealed, in the context of his collusionist narrative, was the utterly false statement that the Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) liberation movement for self defense was “a project aimed at nullifying Armenia’s statehood and future,” the exact opposite of what Artakh and the movement did for the Armenian nation.
Pashinyan further posited that his regime’s mandate to close down the Artsakh movement and the legacy of the democratic state it established, was a “to preserve the Armenian state,” and one on which his administration had purportedly spent over $1 billion. Butressing Turkish, Azeri, and colonial interests in the region, Pashinyan warned Armenians in the homeland and diaspora against “seeking the Armenian homeland within the internationally recognized territories of its four neighbors” — Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, and Georgia, all states illegally occupying Armenian territories to varying degrees. He continued his mendacious tirade on the false and illusory grounds that Armenian claims and actions for justice would leave the Republic’s own needs outside the nation’s focus and would invite retaliatory claims from those four states for Armenian territory in return–a tragic comedy of false equivalencies. He continued his frantic argument claiming Armenian pursuit of national interests and rights, would “trap” the country in a “one-against-four” bottleneck that would force reliance on outside powers who treat Armenia as “a temporary caretaker” and a “tool for restoring their own historical justice,” something the Pashinyan regime has been doing and guaranteeing since its inception. This dynamic, he absurdly claimed, is why Armenians have “historically faced massacres and genocide” without understanding the cause–a classic case of the perpetrator accusing the victim.
Pashinyan’s ludicrous claims are part and parcel of a larger and sinister narrative arc that attempts to relocate the cause of the Armenian Genocide and of every massacre since from the perpetrators to the victims’ own attachment to their indigenous lands — and it does so from the floor of the Armenian Parliament, all in defense of a program that that not only removes Armenian indigenous rights and lands from Armenian state policy, but supports the genocidal designs of Armenia’s enemies. Artsakh was a de facto democratic state functioning in full interstate relationship with Armenia, held short of de jure recognition to preserve the OSCE Minsk Process; the right of return of its indigenous population is affirmed in international law.
Pashinyan also folded his campaign to oust Catholicos Karekin II and “reform” (Read: dismantle and neutralize the 1700 year old Armenian Apostolic Church) into the same program, and attempted to supply new justification for it: the Church’s stance on Artsakh. He accused the Catholicos — whom he repeatedly named by his lay name, Ktrich Nersisyan as a gesture of disrespect to both the person and station of the Catholicos of All Armenians — of purportedly turning the Church into an “institution of war propaganda” by mandating prayers for the protection of the Republic of Artsakh at the close of Sunday services, prayers he audaciously claims threaten the peace process with Azerbaijan. Opposition lawmakers from the Strong Armenia alliance banged their desks in protest at both the rhetoric and the use of the lay name, and walked out of the chamber.
In Pashinyan’s increasingly authoritarian and fascist “Real Armenia,” prayer is now a foreign-policy liability. That is the measure of how completely the Armenian government has accepted Baku’s framing: the surviving institution that still names Artsakh aloud, each week, is treated not as a witness, but as an obstacle.
The program itself carries the change into the text. The 2021–2026 program made safeguarding the rights, security, and status of the people of Artsakh a primary foreign policy objective, with Armenia as their security guarantor. The 2026–2031 program removes the term “Nagorno-Karabakh” entirely, replacing it with bare “Karabakh,” drops the descriptor “forcibly displaced,” and omits any commitment to preserving Armenian cultural and religious heritage in the region. The new stated goal is now the “institutionalization of the established peace with Azerbaijan” — not the right of return, and not self-determination for the more than 150,000 ethnically cleansed indigenous Armenian of Arstakh, bastion of Armenian culture and people for thousands of years. The OSCE Minsk Group, named in the 2021 program as the pathway to resolution, was jointly shuttered at Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s request in August 2025 and closed later that year completely. The bilateral agenda now runs to a Baku-centric peace agreement, border delimitation, and trade and civil-society contact pursuing Pan-Turkic, Western, and Israeli interests.
Sadly, and not surprisingly, the other major player who glaringly dropped the use of the “Nagorno Karabakh” nomenclature was none other than Azerbaijan, which dropped it precisely to foreclose any separate political status for the Armenian territory. Yerevan has now adopted Baku’s vocabulary and lexicon completely in a document of Armenian state policy. Immediately after September 2023, Prime Minister Pashinyan called the expulsion “ethnic cleansing” and the population “forcibly displaced.” Both terms are now gone from the program-erased–much like Artsakh’s indigenous people from their millennial lands. More than 120,000 forcibly displaced, ethnically cleansed indigenous Armenians of Artsakh do not stop existing because a program stops naming them — but a state that will not even write the word down has told its own citizens, and Baku, exactly how hard it intends to press. (Sources: Armen Press Article, Armenian Report Article, Hetq Article, Asbarez Article, Civilnet Article)
“Sitting but Not Kneeling”: Babayan Says Baku Is Letting Armenian Hostages Die Before International Courts Can Hear Them
In a recently released audio recording, former Artsakh Foreign Minister David Babayan warned that serious health problems are widespread among the Armenian hostages illegally held in Azerbaijan and that they are not being treated. His charge is explicit: Azerbaijani authorities are consciously neglecting the mens’ health because they specifically do not want the hostages to survive in order to reach international human rights courts.
This is Medical Terrorism.
Babayan is serving a concocted life sentence handed down by a sham Baku military court after a year-long trial closed to international legal and rights groups. He describes the judicial and appeals process as pre-scripted theater working from scripts the authorities refused to correct even to fix elementary errors, and reports that a defense attorney privately admitted over 95% of the accusations are completely fabricated and lack evidence. His own life sentence was for purotedly attempting to overthrow the Azerbaijani constitution, with no evidence that he ever organized a cell or fought against that government; two further life-sentence articles were added to his charges that were never mentioned at trial, and which he found in a summary handed to him a week after the sham trial ended. Appeals were granted 100% in the prosecution’s favor, and 99.4% at first instance. Court records distorted or entirely omitted what the defendants had said — a practice Babayan called “legal apartheid” — while the court constantly interrupted the Artsakh Armenians as they spoke, refused his request for a video call with a defense attorney (abruptly replaced for alleged “health” reasons), and, despite labeling the proceedings “open,” withheld video of the defense statements even from Azerbaijan’s own human rights defender.
The appeals phase, formal as it was, was necessary in order to petition international courts; Babayan and six colleagues intend to do so. He mockingly thanks the court for the volume of elementary errors and procedural violations, which will strengthen their case abroad. He ends: though we are “sitting [in prison\], we are not kneeling.”
This is testimony from inside the Azeri state’s custody, smuggled out as audio, and it should be read alongside what the Armenian government’s new program no longer says. The men Babayan describes are hostages of the genocidal state that emptied their homeland — not defendants, and not bargaining chips. Medical neglect of prisoners whose survival is the precondition for an international case is not incidental; it is the strategy Babayan says it is. (Sources: Asbarez Article, Audio Recording, Azatutyun Article, Civilnet Article)
Armenia Turns to an Unnamed Third Country as Twenty Armenian Hostages Remain in Baku
Armenia has supposedly applied to a “neutral” third country in hopes to get its diplomats to visit the Armenian hostages held in Azerbaijan, and claims it has obtained Baku’s consent for the arrangement. The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to name the country, saying only that the issue remains a “core focus” aimed at securing the men’s return and addressing humanitarian concerns within Armenia’s commitment to “building peace and confidence.” It is unconfirmed whether the proposed third country has agreed, or whether Azerbaijani authorities have received a formal candidacy application at all.
That channel runs parallel to the private initiative of Veronika Zonabend, wife of the illegally imprisoned former Artsakh State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, who has appealed to Pashinyan to help organize a humanitarian mission to visit the 20 Armenian hostages alongside prominent non-Armenian women human rights advocates. Government departments and captive-focused commissions have met with her to evaluate what state support is possible or allowed by the current regime. Siranush Sahakyan, the Yerevan-based lawyer representing the hostages before the European Court of Human Rights, stressed that arranging third-party visits is extremely important.
Two efforts, and only one of them is the state’s. Zonabend first proposed her mission in May 2026; three months on, the Armenian government claims to be still “evaluating the level of state support possible.” Its own diplomatic channel is unnamed, unconfirmed at both ends, and announced in the same season as a program that deletes the word Artsakh from Armenia’s state vocabulary and further attempts to erase it from the memory of all Armenians. The hostages are illegally held on fabricated charges and face horrific challenges daily, while the machinery moving on their behalf is still being assembled by one hostage’s wife and an attorney. (Source: Asbarez Article)
Baku’s Press Attacks an Award-Winning Documentary and the Diaspora Behind It
The documentary “There’s No Place Like Home,” by filmmaker Diana Madison, records the ethnic cleansing and forced deportation of Artsakh’s indigenous Armenian population in the autumn of 2023 and characterizes that “exodus” as forced displacement. It won Best First Feature at the Croatian International Film Festival in Šibenik. Madison, a Los Angeles–based entrepreneur and producer with no prior documentary experience, has said she set out to counter “propaganda and oil money,” with an Oscar campaign as the goal.
The Azerbaijani state affiliated outlet First News Media has quickly and harshly attacked the documentary, while official Yerevan has kept a conspicuous silence both about the award and the film. The Azeri news source attempts to attribute that silence to a widening split between the Armenian state and the organized Armenian diaspora over the peace process, a division that Azerbaijan has actively supported in hopes of destroying Armenian national interest coalitions and activities. The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and others having opposed the initialed August 2025 peace agreement as a threat to Armenia’s statehood, while Pashinyan has defended it, criticized those diaspora structures vying for authentic Armenian national interests, and have attempted to promote their capitulation to and collusion with regional belligerents as “peace, stability, and normalization with neighbors.” Armenian territorial integrity, human rights, and indigenous resources, as well as the International recognition of the 1915 Genocide are no longer treated as Armenia’s primary objectives, among other national interest pillars for securing Armenian state security and viability under the Pashinyan regime. The Azeri outlet then claims Armenian diaspora organizations’ “political capital is tied to an unresolved conflict” and their lobbying and fundraising rely on the status quo, and absurdly faults European film festivals for rewarding in their propagandistic words “one-sided” Armenian documentaries — naming “1489,” “My Sweet Land,” “There Was, There Was Not,” and “Aurora’s Sunrise”as examples — while they say “completely omitting the Azerbaijani perspective.”
The tell is which Armenian institution Baku’s press chooses to defend. An Azerbaijani state-aligned outlet has written an approving account of the Armenian government’s quarrel with its own diaspora, and an accusation of mercenary motive against the organizations that still press the Artsakh case. The complaint about festivals is the same demand made of every documentary record of an atrocity: that the perpetrator’s account be given equal time, so that a settled fact can be returned to the status of a dispute, establishing a matrix of false equivalencies. (Source: First News Media Article)
Displaced Artsakh Families Offered Partial Rent — If They Give Up Their Housing Certificates
Armenia’s Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Arsen Torosyan, announced a program partially compensating rent for families displaced from Artsakh. The compensation is available only to families that waive their right to the state housing assistance program. To qualify, a family must number one to three members and, either, meet the program’s conditions or have canceled its housing certificate; must already be registered on the state social housing fund waiting list; and must include a member with a permanent Group 1 or Group 2 disability, a profound or severe permanent functional limitation, or someone aged 60 or older. A two-member family must have a combined age of at least 115 years; a three-member family, at least 175. Applicants had to appear in person at a territorial center of the Unified Social Service to join the waiting list before applying online.
Read the eligibility rules as a whole and the program describes its intended recipient precisely: an elderly or disabled household of no more than three, which has already surrendered its claim to a home of its own. A combined-age floor of 175 years across three people is not a social policy so much as an actuarial one. This is what remains of the state’s obligation to more than 120,000 forcibly displaced, ethnically cleansed indigenous Armenians of Artsakh in the same week its governing program stopped calling them forcibly displaced.
Sadly, this is a template used in many authoritarian states in order to further weaken the most vulnerable in society, eventually forcing them to give up permanent residency, and seek humanitarian support in other countries. This is the continuation of lager anti-Armenian genocidal policies, but now being implemented against one’s own indigenous population by the Pashinyan regime and its foreign allies. The aim is to neutralize and remove Artsakh and Artsakh Armenians from a increasingly volatile and undemocratic Armenian political landscape in which the Pashinyan regime is desperate to change to its benefit. (Sources: PanArmenian Article, Armen Press Article)
Four Children of Artsakh’s Displaced Carry Armenia’s Flag to Abu Dhabi
Four young athletes from families forcibly displaced from Artsakh are representing Armenia at the 2026 IMMAF Youth World Championships, held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, from August 16–23, 2026. Each earned his place on the Armenian team on merits and results: Karen Arzumanyan, 17, in the 61.2 kg division; Tigran Gasparyan, the current Armenian champion among 16-to-17-year-olds at 52.2 kg; Samvel Avetisyan, the current Armenian champion at 48 kg; and Erik Hayrapetyan, 13, second in Armenia at 40 kg. The Lorik Humanitarian Fund raised $3,600 — $900 per athlete — covering accommodations, entry fees, and travel in full.
Three thousand six hundred dollars, raised by a humanitarian fund, is what it cost to put four displaced Artsakh children on an international mat under the Armenian flag. It is worth setting that figure beside the $1 billion the Prime Minister cited this same week as evidence that supporting Artsakh had become unaffordable. (Source: Armenian Weekly Article)
“On the Ground” in Occupied Artsakh
The “Settlers Offensive” Advances: A Tractor for the Cameras, 87 More Families Into Emptied Armenian Villages
On August 19th, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev visited the occupied village of Hin Shen (Azeri “Kichik Galaderesi”) in occupied Shushi to inspect “reconstruction work” and meet illegal settlers deployed there. In a conversation with the family of one Asad Asadov, a young girl, Guler Asadova, asked the President for a tractor; the tractor was duly presented to the Asadov family, and Azerbaijan Television (AzTV) was on hand to record the presentation and to report on “how life has begun to return to normal for the residents.” The deployment is part of the “Great Return” illegal settlement program, which has placed 15 families — 51 people — in occupied Hin Shen in its first phase.
Two days later, on August 21st, 87 more settler families were deployed into occupied Stepanakert, occupied Ivanyan (Azeri “Khojaly”), and occupied Martakert (Azeri “Aghdara”), and handed keys to homes. In occupied Stepanakert, 8 families (36 people) went to the Karkijahan settlement. In occupied Ivanyan, 34 families were placed across five occupied villages: Noragyugh (Azeri “Tazabina”), 14 families and 71 people; Khnapat (Azeri “Khanabad”), 8 families and 31 people; Ptretsik (Azeri “Badara”), 5 families and 13 people; Khnatsakh (Azeri “Khanyurdu”), 4 families and 10 people; and Aygestan (Azeri “Ballija”), 3 families and 8 people. In occupied Martakert, 45 families went to four occupied villages: Chapar, 15 families and 51 people; Nerkin Horatagh (Azeri “Ashagy Oratag”), 12 families and 49 people; Kolatak (Azeri “Kolatag”), 12 families and 36 people; and Haterk (Azeri “Hasanriz”), 6 families and 30 people. The handovers were attended by the presidential special representative’s office and the Azeri State Committee for Refugee and IDP Affairs.
Every place named above is an indigenous Armenian village, emptied of its inhabitants in September 2023 and now being settled and repopulated, family by Azeri settler family, as part of Azerbaijan’s growing “Settlers Offensive” — a sinister element of its program of erasure of indigenous Armenians, their culture, and their heritage. Experts hold that the Settlers Offensive is based on Israeli models and algorithms, and it bears noting that Israeli intelligence and military advisors and specialists have been directly involved, to a great degree and in significant numbers, across Azeri state and private-sector work, particularly in the intelligence and defense communities.
The tractor is the point of the exercise: a state broadcaster filming a child’s wish granted on land cleared of its owners, so that a colonization program can be shown to the world as domestic life resuming. (Sources: Occupied Shushi, Relocation to Occupied Artsakh)
Baku Moves from “Reconstruction” to Industry, Logistics, and Tax Breaks on Cleared Land
On August 21st, Azeri sources announced that occupied Artsakh is entering “a new phase of development,” shifting from “large-scale reconstruction” to “industrial, logistics, and investment opportunities.” Manufacturing, industrial, and logistics projects are said to be under development in occupied Akna (Azeri “Aghdam”) and occupied Jrakan (Azeri “Jabrayil”), with tax incentives deployed to draw-in private business. The stated goal is not to restore what was there before, but to build “a region oriented toward sustainable and long-term development.” Restoring occupied Shushi, planners concede, means starting “almost from scratch,” and the redesign is being carried out with renewable energy, digital planning, drone-based aerial surveys, and advanced mapping technologies.
“Starting almost from scratch,” in Shushi, is an admission, delivered as a planning note. What stood there was Armenian, and what is being drawn now is a different city on the same ground. The phase change matters more than the vocabulary: reconstruction can be presented as repair, but industrial parks, logistics corridors, and tax regimes are the apparatus of permanence, built to make the settlement pay for itself before any accounting of the dispossession is ever demanded of Baku.
This large-scale and deeply funded program also expands and buttresses Turkish-Azeri military, logistics, and intelligence designs for regional hegemony and future territorial ambitions at a foundational and dangerous level — drone survey and advanced mapping of occupied terrain are not civilian tools alone. (Source: New Phase of Development in Occupied Artsakh)
Baku Stages Five Burials While Ignoring the Armenians It Disappeared
On August 19th, Azerbaijan claimed that five Azerbaijani soldiers missing since the Artsakh Self Defense War (First Nagorno Karabakh War) had been identified by its State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons and would be buried on August 21, 2026. Chumshud Hasan oghlu Mammadov was to be buried at the Martyrs’ Alley in occupied Berdzor (Azeri “Lachin”); Sardar Jafar oghlu Ismayilov at the cemetery in the village of Astanli, Neftchala district; Vagif Mansim oghlu Maharramov at the Martyrs’ Alley in Neftchala; Murshud Nadir oghlu Narimanov at the cemetery in Mazrali, Imishli district; and Akif Jabrayil oghlu Gurbanov at the Martyrs’ Alley in the Sulutapa settlement of Baku’s Binagadi district.
A burial at the Martyrs’ Alley in occupied Berdzor is a political act more than a funeral — the ceremony plants purported Azerbaijani war dead in occupied Armenian land and calls the land theirs. Set against it the record Baku will not touch: per ALC direction, at least 80 Armenians are forcibly disappeared and more than 200 more remain unaccounted for, and Azerbaijan continues, unabashedly, to ignore its obligations to investigate or acknowledge those cases while fabricating absurdly high numbers for Azeri missing persons. It bears noting that during the Artsakh Self Defense War, confirmed reports described how Azeri authorities — particularly special military and intelligence units — were notorious for killing, torturing, and disappearing their own in the theater of battle and in civilian scenarios, when their own forces refused to fight or attempted to retreat. (Source: Burial of Missing Soldiers)
ANAMA Claims to Recover a First-War Munition from a Cemetery in Occupied Akna
On August 19th, an explosive remnant dating to the Artsakh Self Defense War (First Nagorno Karabakh War) was reported at the Garagaji cemetery in occupied Akna (Azeri “Aghdam”). Azerbaijan’s Mine Action Agency (ANAMA) claims to have dispatched an “operational team,” located the item at a depth of roughly 1.5 meters, and neutralized it. The account is Baku’s own and cannot be independently verified. (Source: Explosive Remnant)
Foreign Interests and Actions in Occupied Artsakh
Baku Tours the Romanian Parliament Selling Investment in Ethnically Cleansed Artsakh
On August 18th, an Azerbaijani delegation led by Elchin Yusubov — Azeri dictator Ilham Aliyev’s special representative in occupied Stepanakert, occupied Martakert (Azeri “Aghdara”), and occupied Ivanyan (Azeri “Khojaly”) — held a series of meetings in the Romanian Parliament, with the “reconstruction and development” of occupied Artsakh as the centerpiece. Meeting Romanian Senator Glad-Aurel Varga, Yusubov presented “large-scale infrastructure projects” and the “economic and investment opportunities being created for foreign investors” on territory whose indigenous population was forcibly expelled in September 2023, and invited the Senator to visit occupied Stepanakert. The delegation also met Marian Neacsu, deputy chairman of the ruling Social Democratic Party and Romanian co-chair of the interparliamentary friendship group, who praised Azerbaijan as a “reliable partner;” Yusubov invited him too, and Neacsu accepted, announcing plans to visit Azerbaijan and occupied Artsakh in the near future.
This is the machinery of normalization operating at parliamentary level. A special representative for three occupied Armenian districts is received in an EU member state’s legislature, sells investment in those districts, and leaves with an acceptance. Every such visit converts occupation into itinerary, and a European legislator’s presence on cleared ground is precisely the imprimatur for which Baku is shopping and getting. (Source: Meeting with Romanian Officials)
British Ambassador to Tour Occupied Shushi — and a British Firm Helped Draw Its Master Plan
On August 21st, Azeri sources reported that the British Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Duncan Norman, will visit occupied Shushi shortly. In the same statement, carried by Modern.az, the Ambassador noted that a British company took part in preparing Shushi’s “Master Plan.”
The second half of that sentence is the story. A visit lends presence; participation in the Master Plan lends professional authorship to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the “redesign” of an Armenian city emptied of Armenians — the same plan whose authors concede they are starting “almost from scratch.”
A British firm has been retained to help draw what replaces Shushi, and the United Kingdom’s ambassador will tour the result. The organization holds that no European government or firm can treat planning work in occupied Artsakh as ordinary commercial practice while the indigenous population of that city remains displaced and its heritage is being demolished. (Source: British Ambassador to Visit Occupied Shushi)
Tashkent Buys In: Uzbek Schools and Factories Underwrite the Occupation
On August 23rd, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev singled out Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s “special role in attracting investment” to occupied Artsakh, describing a bilateral partnership with further cooperation planned across the occupied territories. Azeri sources note that Uzbekistan was the first nation to provide assistance in occupied Artsakh — including the construction of an Azeri Settler School for 960 students — and that Uzbek investment in garment production established the region’s first major industrial facility.
The same day, at the opening of the Nizami Ganjavi National Pedagogical University in “New Tashkent,” Uzbekistan, attended by both presidents, the principal of the Mirza Ulugbek School — which operates in occupied Varanda (Azeri “Fizuli”) — addressed the audience, and a delegation of that school’s students attended, with Aliyev briefed on the school’s activities and on the student scholarships provided under the program.
A school for 960 children and a garment factory, built on ground cleared of its people–genocidal and ethnically cleansed–are settlement infrastructure of first order and the most durable type: textbook academic and industrial whitewashing, manufacturing the working and professional class that makes an occupation self-sustaining. Parading the principal and pupils of a school in occupied Varanda at a university opening in Tashkent completes the exercise with the children of settlers presented to a foreign audience as the natural population of a place whose actual inhabitants are refugees in Armenia.
Uzbekistan’s standing as the first state to fund the occupation is not neutral development assistance; it is participation in genocide. (Sources: Azerbaijan and Uzekistan, Report Article, Apa Article, Message from School in Occupied Artsakh)
The Center for Armenian Research and Analysis (CARA) is a trans-national research institute that provides investigative, analytic, and informational resources to public and private entities across the Armenian experiential spectrum
