The beehives were in no man’s land. After the border clash near his village in April, Geram drove down to the fields where his family has been farming for decades and kept a small apiary.
But when he got near, he heard gunshots. The Azerbaijanis were firing at him from their new positions on the surrounding hilltops. He ran back to his car and never returned.
Another local, Samvel Hyusunts, lost nearly 70 hectares (173 acres) where his family had been farming wheat for decades. “They take what they can have,” he says, standing in a dusty suit and flat cap on the roadside where thousands of refugees have passed from Karabakh into Armenia. “The village is suffering.”
It would hardly be of note if this was in Nagorno-Karabakh, where hundreds have been killed and tens of thousands have fled as Azerbaijan closes in on “reintegrating” its territories in what many Armenians say is a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
But Tegh is in Armenia proper, and the April incident before the war points to how a series of border clashes and encroachments could presage the next great crisis: a revanchist Azerbaijan emboldened by its victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, now eyeing a land corridor to Turkey or even annexing entire regions of what hawks in Baku have begun to call “western Azerbaijan.” In fact, that land is Armenia.
“Initially, it was all about Karabakh and improving their bargaining position and threatening the Armenians’ territorial integrity to deter their support for Karabakh Armenians,” said Stefan Meister, head of the Centre for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations.
“Now, since they have Karabakh under control, they don’t need any agreement with the Armenian government. They might just move forward and say: ‘OK, we have some territory and we take some more. Or just take the whole Syunik region.”
He added: “It’s part of this maximalist approach: you’re hungry and you never stop eating if no one puts a red line,” and said that he had urged western governments to consider sanctions on Baku.
Geram has little doubt another war is coming. He points to the hilltops nearby: “You can see the Azerbaijanis now have positions there, and there and there. Whoever is stronger makes the rules.
“I fear it won’t be us,” he says, standing outside the small corner shop on the main road through Tegh where he works most days. He brings out a pair of binoculars to show the land where his family used to farm.
After losing a war in 2020, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a ceasefire agreement with Azerbaijan brokered by Russia that grants a land corridor through Armenia to Nakhchivan, an Azerbaijani exclave, and on to Turkey, Azerbaijan’s closest ally. The corridor, which was to run along a railway through southern Armenia, was to be policed by the FSB, Russia’s main border guard service.
But the Azerbaijani parliament has also held recent hearings on western Azerbaijan, an irredentist term that the country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, has also started to use in public and which in particular refers to the Syunik province, where Tegh is located.
Every local understands they are in harm’s way. Samvel, a shepherd, takes his long stick and draws a map in a muddy path – here is Azerbaijan and here is Turkey, he says, and only Armenia’s Syunik region, where we are, sits between them.
Samvel once had a flock of 500 sheep, he says, but lost his grazing lands near the border after the 2020 war and was forced to sell off all but 30. He lost an eye in the fighting in the 1990s, he said, when a grenade sent shrapnel through the left side of his face. He says that Armenia is being overpowered by Azerbaijan and a coterie of international allies, among which he includes Russia. “Soon there are going to be no Armenians left,” he adds.
It is not guaranteed that the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh government will lead to further fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
As Benyamin Poghosyan, senior fellow on foreign policy at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia noted, one line of thought is that the flight of the Karabakh population to Armenia could, somewhat counterintuitively, remove a stumbling block to the two countries signing a peace treaty.
Armenia’s own parliament speaker has said the sides are very close to having a “historic opportunity to sign a peace agreement”.
But, Poghosyan said, it is more likely that Azerbaijan would be emboldened by the Karabakh victory to demand further concessions, including the transit route to Nakhchiven.
“The destruction of Karabakh will allow Azerbaijan to focus all its forces – military, diplomatic, political – in Armenia’s direction,” he said.
He added that in the long-term, Azerbaijan may set itself the goal of occupying part of the Syunik or Vayots Dzor regions, but that it would probably take more incremental steps in the short term to prevent an international backlash.
“They can penetrate in one or two directions … and then offer Armenia that if you would like Azerbaijan troops to return to the prewar positions, you should accept the opening of routes to connect Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan,” Poghosyan said.
Those routes could include an attack at Jermuk, a mountain town in the northern Vayots Dzor region, where Azerbaijani troops have been already taken positions in the heights overlooking the settlement, or at Kapan, the capital of the Syunik region, he said.
From Tegh, looking out over the fields that lead to Karabakh, Samvel the shepherd says he hopes to see peace but expects there to be war.
“Before it was Karabakh,” he says, “But now all of Karabakh has come here. I fear they might not be far behind.”
