“I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from?” - Psalm 121
Nagorno-Karabakh is a breakaway region in the South Caucasus, internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but populated and controlled by ethnic Armenians.
On 12 December 2022 a group of Azeri ‘eco-activists’ began a blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with the outside world. This left around 120,000 people stranded in Nagorno-Karabakh, while on the Armenian side of the Corridor more than 1,000 people were unable to return home, including a group of young dancers from Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, who were competing in Tbilisi and found themselves stuck in the border town of Goris when the blockade began.
The conflict extends further than Nagorno-Karabakh. Regular violations of the ceasefire that ended the 2020 war occur along the line of contact between Armenian and Azeri forces, and pressure continues to mount over a proposed corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its exclave Nakhchivan through Armenian territory.
People living in Armenian villages near the border expect full-scale conflict in the near future, while for now they live in fear.