On Sept. 27, a Sunday morning, some residents of Yerevan, Armenia, woke up to find their internet hacked and their home Wi-Fi networks renamed “KarabakhIsAzerbaijan”—a direct quote from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. It was an announcement that war had begun.
Like a stalled car, decades of peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh had slowed to a stop. The OSCE Minsk Group, the sole negotiations track since 1994, had delivered no breakthroughs. It hadn’t even put out a major proposal since 2007. In the last four years, since the start of the Trump administration, it had gone almost completely quiet.
