The Armenia Crisis: India’s Interests and Opportunities in the South Caucasus Region

The dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region began in the 1980s when the territory, predominantly ethnic Armenians, declared independence from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union’s dissolution was already geared. Before the Soviet collapse, the Nagorno-Karabakh region, known as Artsakh by the Armenians, was the autonomous administrative region that officially lies in the former Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). In 1988, the ethnic population of Nagorno-Karabakh, a minority in the Azerbaijan SSR, demanded its integration with the Armenia SSR, which the Azerbaijan SSR and the Soviet government did not accept. The rejection of their demands and the ethnic grudges inflaming led to the beginning of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1988, within the Soviet Union.1 With the Soviet disintegration in 1991, the dispute entered into a violent phase that continued till 1994 when a ceasefire was declared by the joint efforts of Russia and Minsk Group, an informal committee, to end the first Nagorno-Karabakh war.

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