Abandoned by Russian ‘peacekeepers’, Armenia is crying out for our help

What is happening now, at an astonishing rate, in Nagorno-Karabakh is effectively ethnic cleansing on a mass scale.

A formerly autonomous province of Azerbaijan, populated overwhelmingly by people of Armenian ancestry, Nagorno-Karabakh has simply emptied itself out, after a short clash between the rival Caucasian states. It has created another humanitarian crisis and another wave of refugees in a world with no shortage of either.

Karabakh has led a precarious existence since the end of the Soviet Union, which once encompassed Armenia and Azerbaijan and mostly smothered such tensions. With the Russians gone, the area has been the subject of a succession of bloody struggles for supremacy over the succeeding decades. Before the latest outbreak of hostilities, about 120,000 of Karabakh’s residents remained, from around 200,000 at the end of the Soviet era in 1991.