Baku has already convicted the separatist leaders and field commanders. The three men who made the decisions in Yerevan are still not in the dock
On October 15 in Baku, at the Seventh Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the heads of state and government of half the continent gathered around one table. The agenda was pointedly peaceful: transport corridors, digitalization, tourism, and the results of Azerbaijan's two-year chairmanship. In the middle of this diplomatic prose, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan uttered a sentence that protocol officers usually advise softening. Armenia's former leadership, all three ex-presidents and their accomplices, war criminals and child killers, he said, have still not received the punishment they deserve.
Then came a detail that will be remembered longer than any official wording. Those who once threatened to roll into Baku on tanks and drink tea here, the head of state said, are now drinking Azerbaijani tea in our prisons, and their tanks are on display in the Military Trophy Park.
Between those two sentences lies the central legal storyline of this fall. Azerbaijani prisons have taken in the second tier: the leaders of the separatist entity, its ministers and its commanders. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, and Serzh Sargsyan live in Yerevan, give interviews, and run political parties. Azerbaijan won the war. Now it is presenting the bill for it.
One Sentence Serzh Sargsyan Can Never Take Back
In December 2000, a British researcher gathering material for a book on the Karabakh war recorded a conversation with Armenia's then defense minister. The interview was conducted in Russian. Asked about Khojaly, Serzh Sargsyan said: "Before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought we were just joking around with them." He then elaborated: in Azerbaijan, he claimed, people had believed Armenians incapable of raising a hand against civilians, and that stereotype had been broken. In 2012, when his interlocutor already occupied the presidential office, the author published the full transcript to put an end to disputes over the accuracy of the quote.
I consider this text the most candid document of the entire war. No Azerbaijani prosecutor could have formulated the motive more precisely than the man who, in February 1992, headed the Nagorno-Karabakh Self-Defense Forces Committee. According to his official biography, Sargsyan commanded that body from 1989 to 1993. What we have here is testimony from within the chain of command, not the opinion of a retired politician.
Every Azerbaijani knows the Khojaly figures. On the night of February 25–26, 1992, 613 civilians were killed, among them 106 women, 63 children, and 70 elderly people. Another 487 were wounded, and 1,275 were taken prisoner or hostage. I remember that winter in Baku well. The first accounts came from Aghdam, where survivors had made their way through the snowbound forest, and for a long time the city refused to believe the rumors would prove true. In the end, it had no choice.
As early as the spring of 1992, Russian human rights activists documented the participation in the assault of servicemen from the 366th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the former Soviet Army, which was stationed in Khankendi. For an investigator, this detail is invaluable. The regiment had a table of organization, commanders, and combat logs, and some of those papers may have survived in the archives. The chain of command ceases to be an abstraction and becomes a list of names.
Here honesty demands a concession. Azerbaijan characterizes Khojaly as genocide, and for the national memory that assessment is final. International law, however, requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a group as such for that characterization, and no international verdict on this point exists yet. That said, the defense will find it extremely difficult to read the words about a "broken stereotype" as anything other than an intent to terrorize an entire people by killing its most defenseless members. The killing of civilians and the torture and abuse of prisoners are prosecutable under any characterization.
Three Biographies, One Karabakh Headquarters
The first president's timeline reads like a map of lost districts. Ter-Petrosyan led Armenia from 1991 to 1998. On his watch, Shusha and Lachin fell in May 1992, Kalbajar in April 1993, Aghdam in July, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, and Gubadly in August, and Zangilan in October. By the ceasefire of May 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts were under Armenian control.
Kocharyan and Sargsyan entered national politics straight from the Karabakh trenches. From August 1992, Kocharyan headed the State Defense Committee of the separatist entity, later became its "president," and in 1997 moved to Yerevan as prime minister. Sargsyan built up Karabakh's armed formations and, after the ceasefire, followed a path that in any other country would be called a security-services career in an occupied territory: defense minister, head of the national security agency, chief of the presidential administration, prime minister, and finally president, inheriting from Kocharyan for ten years both the presidential chair and the frozen conflict. In none of those posts did he take a single step toward implementing the Security Council resolutions.
The most underrated episode of this story occurred in the winter of 1998. In the fall of 1997, Ter-Petrosyan published an article acknowledging that dragging out the conflict was ruining Armenia, and he leaned toward a phased settlement plan that would return the districts. He was opposed by Prime Minister Kocharyan, Defense Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, and Serzh Sargsyan, who was then in charge of internal affairs and national security. On February 3, 1998, the president resigned. The Karabakh group effectively removed from power a man who had allowed himself even to contemplate compromise, and for the next twenty years its representatives ran the country.
For investigators, this episode cuts both ways. Ter-Petrosyan bears responsibility for the period of the seizures, even though he later tried to find a way out. Kocharyan and Sargsyan inherited the occupation and deliberately entrenched it. The three share political responsibility. Criminal responsibility will have to be proven individually, through specific orders and knowledge, not through the posts they held.
Armenia has already tried once to prosecute one of these three. In 2018, Kocharyan was charged in connection with the events of March 1, 2008, when ten people were killed as an opposition rally in Yerevan was broken up. Three years later, the Constitutional Court ruled the article under which he was charged unconstitutional, and the case collapsed. Armenian justice took an interest in the fate of ten Armenian citizens. Thousands of Azerbaijanis never came into its field of vision.
Strasbourg Has Already Answered a Question Yerevan Considered Closed
For thirty years, official Yerevan maintained that an independent republic operated in Karabakh and that Armenia merely sympathized with its kin. On June 16, 2015, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights demolished that construct. In Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, six refugees from the Lachin district complained that they could not return to their homes and land. The Court found that Armenia exercised effective control over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts by virtue of its military, political, and financial support, and was therefore responsible for violations of rights in those territories. In December 2017, each applicant was awarded 5,000 euros in compensation.
The sum is symbolic. The precedent carries weight. The Strasbourg finding of control does not establish the criminal guilt of specific individuals, but it does strip the defense of its favorite argument, namely that everything happening on the occupied lands was decided in Khankendi without Yerevan's knowledge. Once a state controlled the territory, the question of exactly who within that state made the decisions becomes a matter for investigation.
4,010 Names for Whom the War Is Not Over
The overall toll is well known: more than 23,000 dead, over 820,000 internally displaced persons from the occupied districts, and some 250,000 Azerbaijanis expelled from Armenia in the late 1980s. That is more than a million people in a country with a population of just over seven million. The heaviest ledger in this case is kept by the State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons. I trust its data more than any other estimates, because they are built on lists of names and backed by a genetic database. As of October 1, 2026, the commission lists 4,010 Azerbaijani citizens as missing, 4,004 of whom disappeared during the first war. The list includes 3,228 military personnel and 782 civilians.
On October 7, the chairman of the commission told an international conference at the Gulustan Palace that remains believed to belong to 913 missing persons have been found. The remains of 253 people have been recovered from 32 mass graves on the liberated lands. Biological samples have been provided by 11,566 relatives. In the same hall, an address from the head of state was read out: Armenia must provide all information on the fate of missing Azerbaijanis and on the locations of mass and individual graves, and must create the conditions for access to archives and the collection of witness testimony.
The ratio of 913 to 4,010 speaks for itself. After six years of searching on the liberated lands, the fate of three out of every four people remains unknown.
Legally, the sharpest part of these statistics is a list of 834 people that Baku handed to Yerevan as those taken prisoner or held hostage during the first war. Detailed information has been provided on 104 of them. A soldier killed in battle remains a tragedy of war. A prisoner who was seen alive in the hands of a specific unit and then vanished becomes the subject of a criminal case for enforced disappearance. Here the doctrine of command responsibility comes into full force: a superior who knew or should have known of the killings and failed to prevent them is liable alongside the perpetrator.
A Million and a Half Mines Sent into the Future
The occupation keeps killing even after its end. According to the Azerbaijani side, more than 1.5 million mines have been laid across the lands of Karabakh and East Zangezur. The figure is an estimate; deminers do not count every charge one by one, and I ask readers to treat it as such. The casualty count, by contrast, is accurate to the person. According to data circulated by Azerbaijan's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in April 2026, 421 people have been hit by mines since November 2020: 72 were killed and 349 wounded. Over more than three decades, the number of victims of mines and unexploded ordnance has exceeded 3,400.
A mine in a field is not always a war crime in itself. The legal assessment depends on the type of munition, when it was laid, the military situation, and the measures taken to protect civilians. Mining the roads to abandoned villages, cemeteries, and residential neighborhoods years after a ceasefire looks entirely different. Such a mine defends nothing. It waits for the owner to come home.
Aghdam demonstrates the same mechanism on the scale of an entire city. Once one of the region's economic hubs, it returned to Azerbaijani control as a field of ruins and had to be rebuilt under a new master plan. Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from destroying property unless rendered absolutely necessary by military operations, and Article 147 classifies extensive and wanton destruction of property as a grave breach of the Convention. Twenty-seven years of dismantling homes for building materials cannot be explained by military necessity.
The official inventory of destruction runs to several pages: more than 900 settlements, some 150,000 homes, about 7,000 public buildings, over 1,100 educational institutions, 927 libraries, and 160 bridges. Different agencies count schools and monuments using different methodologies, so the totals diverge slightly. For future claims, this discrepancy remains a working task: every item of damage needs its own file, with photographs, property documents, and owners' testimony.
Four Resolutions the World Adopted and Forgot
In 1993, over seven months, the UN Security Council adopted four resolutions on Karabakh. Resolution 822 of April 30 demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces from Kalbajar. Resolution 853 of July 29 condemned the seizure of Aghdam. Resolution 874 of October 14 endorsed a timetable for a settlement. Finally, Resolution 884 of November 12 condemned the seizure of Zangilan and Horadiz and the shelling of civilians. All four reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. Not one was implemented.
The OSCE Minsk Group, established in 1992, operated from 1997 under the co-chairmanship of Russia, the United States, and France. For nearly a quarter of a century, the mediators issued statements and convened summits. In Baku on October 15, the head of state summed up their work in a single word: imitation. In his assessment, the co-chairs had monopolized the process and sought to freeze the conflict.
One can argue about the mediators' motives. There is no arguing with the outcome. Azerbaijan had to restore its sovereignty on its own: in the 44-day war of 2020, when the army liberated more than 300 settlements, and in September 2023, when the separatist structure collapsed in less than a day. For the question of accountability, one conclusion matters here. Three decades of international impotence became three decades of impunity, and those years spanned the presidential terms of all three men.
The Dock in Baku Is Only Half Full
On January 17, 2025, the Baku Military Court opened the trial of fifteen former leaders of the separatist entity. The indictment covered more than twenty articles of the Criminal Code and 2,548 counts. On February 5, 2026, Arayik Harutyunyan, Davit Ishkhanyan, Davit Babayan, Levon Mnatsakanyan, and Davit Manukyan were sentenced to life imprisonment. The regime's former heads, Bako Sahakyan and Arkadi Ghukasyan, each received 20 years, since the law does not permit life sentences for defendants over 65. The remaining defendants received lengthy prison terms. On February 17, Ruben Vardanyan was sentenced to 20 years. On August 6, the Court of Appeal upheld the sentences.
One detail of the trial deserves more attention than it has received. Ghukasyan admitted in court that he had decorated Armenian military commanders for the 1992 Shusha operation, although he denied any knowledge of crimes. The link between the Karabakh structures and the Armenian army command, which Yerevan had denied for decades, was confirmed by one of its own participants.
The Armenian side and some international human rights advocates dispute the fairness of the trial. Brushing off that criticism would be a mistake. The more thoroughly the evidence withstands outside scrutiny, the harder it will be to dismiss the verdicts as victor's revenge. Nuremberg went down in legal history because the victors spent months on documents.
A fundamental line separates those convicted in Baku from Armenia's three former presidents. The former led an entity that Strasbourg recognized as controlled by Yerevan. The latter ran Yerevan itself. The chain of responsibility, broken off at the level of Khankendi, remains incomplete.
Kocharyan and Sargsyan, for their part, have long ceased to feel entirely safe. On February 21, 2022, Azerbaijan's Military Prosecutor's Office placed both on the international wanted list. The charges at the time concerned organizing the 1988 rallies that incited ethnic hatred and their role in creating the separatist "republic" in 1991. Episodes from the war, Khojaly, and the fate of the prisoners were not included in those orders. Ter-Petrosyan did not appear on the wanted lists at all.
The Peace Treaty Clause No One Likes to Mention
On August 8, 2025, at the White House, in the presence of Donald Trump, President Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan adopted a joint declaration, and the foreign ministers initialed the text of the Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Interstate Relations. Since then, there has been no shooting on the border, Azerbaijan has lifted restrictions on cargo transit to Armenia, and it has begun supplying petroleum products there. The signing, however, is held up by the Armenian constitution, whose preamble references the Declaration of Independence with its claims to Karabakh. It can be amended only through a referendum. Pashinyan has included the signing and ratification of the treaty in his government's program for 2026–2031 and called it his personal priority.
The initialed text contains a provision that changes the entire legal architecture of the dispute. The parties undertake to withdraw interstate claims and complaints before international bodies and not to file new ones. The reciprocal cases under the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at the International Court of Justice, where on November 12, 2024, the Court confirmed its jurisdiction over a number of claims, are to disappear once the treaty enters into force. So are the interstate applications in Strasbourg.
Baku has made sure that the humanitarian part of the past does not sink along with the lawsuits. Back in October 2025, addressing participants in the previous conference on missing persons, President Ilham Aliyev stressed that the inclusion in the peace agreement of a special clause on persons missing as a result of the conflict shows how much importance Azerbaijan attaches to the issue, and that the Armenian side is obliged to disclose the locations of other mass graves where Azerbaijanis were killed and buried. The clause on the missing will outlive the withdrawal of the lawsuits. Behind it lie remains that sooner or later will speak in the language of forensic science.
Hence a conclusion that is rarely voiced. Peace will settle the accounts between states. Individual criminal responsibility is not part of that package, because the treaty governs relations between republics, not the fate of specific people accused of crimes against humanity. Once the interstate claims are withdrawn, the personal accountability of former leaders will remain the main legal channel through which Baku can seek justice for the past. I read the words spoken on October 15 as a claim staked on that channel before the others close.
The internal Armenian dimension of the story is also intriguing. All three have long been in opposition to Pashinyan, and Kocharyan and Sargsyan have spent years building political campaigns against him. Baku is cutting the current government in Yerevan no slack: in the same speech, the head of state recalled that since 2018 the new Armenian leadership had continued its predecessors' policy, right down to the slogan "Karabakh is Armenia, period," proclaimed in Khankendi in 2019. Nevertheless, in my assessment, the accountability of the three is a rare subject on which Baku's interests and the political survival of Armenia's current government diverge less than is commonly assumed.
A Liberian President in The Hague: A Precedent Yerevan Prefers to Forget
Skeptics will say that former heads of state are not put on trial. The past thirty years prove otherwise. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted 161 people, among them presidents, ministers, and generals. Slobodan Milošević died in his cell in 2006 before a verdict could be reached. Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić received life sentences.
The Liberian analogy is even more precise. President Charles Taylor did not personally fight in Sierra Leone. He armed and financed rebels in a neighboring country, receiving diamonds in return. In 2012, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, sitting in The Hague, sentenced him to 50 years in prison for aiding and abetting, as well as planning, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The formula of a state supporting an armed group on foreign territory almost exactly mirrors what Strasbourg established in the Chiragov case. Former Chadian President Hissène Habré was convicted in 2016 by a special court in Senegal established under an agreement with the African Union. There is no statute of limitations for international crimes, and a head of state's personal immunity ends along with his term in office.
The real obstacles are serious, however, and I will not downplay them. For Armenia, the Rome Statute entered into force only on February 1, 2024, which gives the International Criminal Court no jurisdiction over the events of 1992–1993, and Azerbaijan is not a party to the Statute. The International Court of Justice hears disputes between states, not cases against individuals. A special tribunal would require a Security Council decision or a multilateral treaty, and Yerevan will not agree to that. What remains are Azerbaijan's national courts with trials in absentia, requests for legal assistance, and the universal jurisdiction of third countries, where victims are entitled to file complaints if the accused turns up on their territory.
Two Scenarios and One Date
The first scenario I would call the documentary one. Baku continues searching for graves, expands the genetic database, examines the archives left behind in the returned territories, and compiles a separate dossier on each of the three, in which exhumations, ballistics, and orders are linked into a single chain. In this version, a verdict may be a long time coming, but the indictment will become a fact of international debate that no change of power in Yerevan can undo.
The second scenario is the political one. The accountability of the former presidents becomes a bargaining chip around the signing of the treaty and the Armenian referendum, and then quietly drops off the agenda. For Azerbaijan, such an outcome would repeat the story of the 1993 resolutions: vindication acknowledged, no consequences. The tone of the October 15 speech shows that Baku has chosen the first path.
My forecast is specific. By the end of 2027, Azerbaijani prosecutors will expand the charges against Kocharyan and Sargsyan to include war crimes, above all Khojaly, and will for the first time bring charges against Levon Ter-Petrosyan. This will happen before the peace treaty is signed. One question remains to which I have no answer: will a single European country dare to detain a former Armenian president if he flies in on a private visit and is met with a complaint from the families of Khojaly?
Until there is an answer, the work goes on elsewhere. The State Commission's genetic database holds samples from 11,566 relatives of the missing. Behind each sample is the name of a son, a brother, or a father, entered on a list three decades ago. The remains believed to belong to 913 of these people have already been raised from the earth. The fate of the remaining 3,097 is known to the archives in Yerevan and to those who once gave the orders.