The authorities have promised justice for victims in the “Tartar case” and followed up with arrests and annulled verdicts. But the victims’ families say it’s not enough.
As a new border commission prepares to start work, it will have to reckon with persistent disagreements over what to do with a handful of quirks of Soviet border-drawing.
Armenia’s willingness to accept Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh comes with an expectation that Baku will make reciprocal compromises. But there are little indications so far what those might be.
The president has reaffirmed the special place that the Russian language has in Azerbaijan even as a backlash against Russian culture has swept the rest of the world.
One Armenian-populated village was evacuated and taken – at least temporarily – by Azerbaijani forces, as Russia criticized Baku for breaching the ceasefire.
Labor migrants are attempting to leave Russia as their jobs have been hit by sanctions. But they can’t cross the border into Azerbaijan, which has remained closed since the beginning of the pandemic.
While the government has maintained a deeply cautious stance, coverage of the war in the state-controlled media has shown a clear, albeit implicit, pro-Ukraine stance.
A new government investigation has brought arrests and official recognition of many more victims. But it remains unclear why the Tartar case, which alleged widespread spying in the military, was launched in the first place.
To many in Azerbaijan, it appeared that the new agreement was aimed at ensuring their country’s loyalty to Russia during the attack on Ukraine. Officials said the timing was just a coincidence.
Baku already held the record in 2010, before losing it to Tajikistan less than a year later. Now it is aiming to again one-up the current record holder in Saudi Arabia.
The government is promising to resettle residents displaced in the 1990s into “smart villages.” But the timeline for that resettlement keeps slipping as reports of worker mistreatment have emerged.
The Ministry of Culture issued a new statement responding to international criticism of an earlier announcement that it intended to “remove” Armenian “forgeries” from churches on its territory.
The minister of culture said that a working group will be set up to identify what he called “Armenian forgery” from churches, putting into practice a pseudoscientific theory that denies the churches’ Armenian origin.
The dark circumstances around the attempted murder of the mayor of Azerbaijan’s second city have yet to be uncovered, and many seemingly uninvolved people continue to await justice.
The long-announced trips have been eagerly awaited by Azerbaijanis displaced from the region three decades ago. But restrictions on the tours have led to some discontent.
It is aimed at making university more accessible. But there are several catches, and student advocates argue that it would be better to eliminate tuition altogether.
