AZERIS RAZE STEPANAKERT CATHEDRAL, CELEBRATE THE RUINS

YEREVAN LEAVES ZONABEND WAITING ON BAKU DELEGATION

ATLANTIC COUNCIL FELLOW SELLS TRIPP AS PEACE

The Center for Armenian Research and Analysis (CARA) gathers and analyzes critical information on activities occurring in occupied Artsakh by state and non-state actors, and produces a weekly brief, with actionable data, to public and private stakeholders. Keeping Artsakh alive and in the public consciousness is part and parcel of CARA’s mission of providing clear and unfettered research and analysis pertaining to indigenous Armenian rights and cultural survival.

TOP ARTSAKH HEADLINES, AUGUST 10-16, 2026

Azeris Raze Stepanakert’s Mother Cathedral and Celebrate the Ruins as a “Victory”

Satellite monitoring has confirmed that the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, the principal cathedral of occupied Stepanakert in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), was destroyed sometime between March 3 and April 2, 2026. Azerbaijani social media users greeted the demolition of the Armenian Christian Church not as a cultural loss but as a “victory”: one Azerbaijani woman posted a photograph of the ruins captioned “gorbagor oldu”, “disappeared,” or “was destroyed,” expressing pride over the site where she had stood in 2025, when the cathedral was still intact. According to Hovik Avanesov, the Artsakh Cultural Heritage Ombudsman, this reflects a systemic and systematic policy of cultural genocide aimed at erasing Armenian indigenous presence in Artsakh entirely. This policy is part of a state-supported campaign under which Armenian churches, monasteries, cemeteries, Khachkars, and whole historic neighborhoods are demolished, altered, or “reinterpreted” to deny that they were ever Armenian. Cultural genocide begins, Avanesov warns, at the moment the destruction of a monument is no longer perceived as a crime and is, instead ,transformed into a symbol of victory and state pride. Handed detailed reports and satellite evidence, international cultural heritage bodies have failed to implement effective preventive measures, limiting themselves to retrospective recordings of what was already destroyed by the Azeri state. Against that impunity, Avanesov calls for international monitoring mechanisms, independent expert fact-finding missions, and legal and political accountability for those responsible for the continuing cultural ethnic cleansing.

This is a pattern Azerbaijan has already completed once, in plain sight and without consequence. In Occupied Armenian Nakhichevan, Azerbaijani forces erased the ancient Armenian cemetery of Djulfa and the heritage around it completely — 89 churches, 5,840 khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones — and  international bodies now producing retrospective records of Stepanakert recorded that destruction in the same manner, after there was nothing left to preserve. The demolition of the Mother Cathedral is not an excess of the occupation. It is the Azeri occupation working as designed, and the impunity is the instrument. (Source: Asbarez Article)

Armenian Government Offers Zonabend a Meeting It Has Not Yet Arranged

Veronika Zonabend, wife of the illegally imprisoned former Artsakh State Minister and philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, released a statement responding to the August 8th address by Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, in which he expressed “deep concern” over the imprisonment of Armenian compatriots in Azerbaijan. Zonabend welcomed the remarks and noted media reports designating the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the authority responsible for coordinating a meeting with her, then stated plainly that no contact had ever been established and that she had received no contact details whatsoever for the designated official. Only after she said so publicly did the Armenian MFA answer: spokesperson Ani Badalyan confirmed a verbal offer to meet, with timing and schedule “still to be finalized” by the ministry’s “competent departments.”

What Zonabend has been trying to arrange is not complicated. Since June, she has worked to organize an international women’s humanitarian delegation to Baku, appealing to Azerbaijani Ombudsperson Sabina Aliyeva to permit the delegation to visit the notorious Umbaki prison, meet with the hostages held there, and deliver family parcels, letters, and photographs. Armenian citizens illegally held by the Azeri state have been cut off from independent humanitarian contact with their families for years. She has twice written to both Pashinyan and the Azerbaijani Ombudsperson.

That the Armenian government’s participation had to be extracted by a public statement from a hostage’s wife, and that the result amounts, so far, to a mere verbal offer with no name and no telephone number attached to it, is the measure of Yerevan’s engagement on behalf of the Armenians still illegally held and abused in Baku. The delegation is a private initiative by the families of hostages, and it remains one. (Sources: News.am Article, News.am Article, Asbarez Article)

Displaced Artsakh Women Rebuild Livelihoods on Crafts That Outlived Genocide

Following the September 2023 blockade and forced displacement of more than 150,000 ethnically cleansed indigenous Armenians of Artsakh into Armenia, the Artsakh Fund has moved from temporary crisis relief to long-term economic independence for displaced women through its Help Artsakh Women Rebuild Initiative, which trains participants in two heritage crafts: traditional Artsakh carpet weaving, and Marash embroidery, the Armenian needlework distinguished by its patterns, techniques, and symbolic designs. The program is built to reach paying buyers rather than to “keep its participants occupied.” Included in the program’s targeted demographic of potential supporters are the global Armenian diaspora, art collectors, specialty retailers, and interior designers. The Artsakh Carpet Company has committed to hiring three graduates as professional weavers.

Both crafts are themselves indigenous Armenian traditions and mechanisms of survival. Marash embroidery is the needlework of a community that survived the Armenian Genocide, carried into exile in the hands of the survivors; Artsakh’s weaving tradition is now practiced by women who no longer live in Artsakh. A program that teaches ethnically cleansed women to earn livelihood and self sustainability from the material culture of their homeland is doing what international institutions and the current Armenian regime have not: keeping an ethnically cleansed people and culture alive while the native territory from which it emanates is stripped of every trace of its millennial presence. (Source: Armenian Weekly Article)

Artsakh’s State Ensembles to Carry a Homeland They Cannot Enter to Vienna

The Artsakh Cultural Preservation Center NGO has been officially invited to the XVI International Christmas Choir Festival, “Vienna Christmas Voices,” to be held November 27 to 30 in Vienna, Austria and organized by the World Festival Association (WOFA). The State Orchestra of National Instruments of Artsakh and the “We Are Our Mountains” State Song and Dance Ensemble will represent Armenian and Artsakh cultural heritage there. The invitation builds on earlier international appearances by the NGO, including a CIOFF folklore festival in Italy held under UNESCO auspices.

These are the state ensembles of a republic and people that Azerbaijan erased, and the mountains for which they are named lay behind an occupation line their musicians cannot cross. They will perform Artsakh’s heritage in Vienna in the same year that satellite imagery confirmed the demolition of Artsakh’s Mother Cathedral in occupied Stepanakert. Sadly, and ironically, UNESCO’s name appears on the festival circuit that hosts the ensembles while UNESCO’s  institutional machinery has produced nothing but after-the-fact records of the destruction at home. (Source: News.am Article)

“On the Ground” in Occupied Artsakh

Azeri Demining Agency Claims 1,581 Hectares Cleared in a Single Week

Between August 3 and 9, 2026, Azerbaijan’s National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) claimed to have cleared 1,581 hectares of land in occupied Artsakh, supposedly detecting and neutralizing 87 anti-personnel mines, 20 anti-tank mines, and 784 pieces of unexploded ordnance over this one, single week. The figures are Baku’s own, published on a weekly cycle, and cannot be independently verified.

These pretextual announcements are issued by the Azeri state to anchor its false narrative that the occupied and ethnically cleansed territories of Artsakh are a post-war “humanitarian theater” rather than the site of genocide, and also aims to underwrite the programmatic settlement offensive it has unleashed in tandem with these “demining operations.” (Source: ANAMA Weekly Report)

Baku Wires Occupied Ivanyan and Martuni for Its Settlers

Azerbaijan is carrying out a massive electricity infrastructure buildout across occupied Ivanyan (Azeri “Khojaly”) and occupied Martuni (Azeri “Khojavand”), which Azeri state operator Azerishiq OJSC describes as providing “reliable, stable, and uninterrupted power” for “relocating residents.” Networks are purportedly being “renewed” in nearly 30 villages and settlements, with nearly 100 complete 35/0.4 kV transformer substations being installed, new metal poles and insulated power lines erected, existing 10 kV and 35 kV overhead lines restored, and “smart” electricity meters deployed. Ten modern substations are purportedly in place in occupied Ivanyan city, with “reconstruction” finished in the occupied villages of Ptretsik (Azeri “Badara”), Aygestan (Azeri “Ballıca”), Astghashen (Azeri “Dashbulag”), Noragyugh (Azeri “Təzəbinə”), and Khachen (Azeri “Seyidbəyli”), and insulated wiring is being implemented at occupied Shosh (Azeri “Shushakend”). In the occupied Martuni region, Azeri settlers deployed in occupied Hadrut, Karmir Shuka (Azeri “Girmizi Bazar”), and Sos have been connected to stable supply, with so-called “upgrades” continuing in the district center and in the occupied villages of Hatsi (Azeri “Chorekli”), Berdashen (Azeri “Garakend”), and Khnushinak (Azeri “Khanoba”).

“Relocating residents” is the Azeri state’s public-facing phrase for its deployment of  illegal occupation settlers into villages that were purged of their indigenous Armenian inhabitants in September of 2023. Smart meters, substations, and insulated lines are not reconstruction for a returning population — they are a permanent strategic utility and infrastructure grid that is part and parcel of Azerbaijan’s calculated “Settlers Offensive,” laid village by village so that the settlement becomes irreversible, long before any accounting of the dispossession is ever demanded of Baku. This large -scale and deeply funded plan expands and buttresses Turkish Azeri military, logistics, and intelligence designs for regional hegemony and future territorial aspirations at a foundational and dangerous level. (Source: Network Upgrades in Occupied Artsakh)

Baku Walks Diaspora Youth Through an “Inverted War” in Occupied Artsakh

On August 10th, long-time Azeri state collaborator, photojournalist Reza Deghati, met with young participants of the so-called “7th Summer Camp for Diaspora Youth,” which took place in occupied Artsakh from August 2 to 8. The meeting was touted by Azeri state media as “the  centerpiece of the initiative held by State Committee on Work with Diaspora of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, which collected 123 Azeri youth from 64 countries to be part of this event. Deghati’s presentation cultivated the false narrative propounded by Azeri state authorities across multiple media platforms as “the destruction of “Azerbaijani territories during the Armenian occupation,” depicting  cities and villages purportedly reduced to ruins, damaged “historical and cultural heritage,” and what was called “the human toll” of what Azeri sources call “the Karabakh conflict.” Masim Mammadov, the presidential representative in occupied Berdzor (Azeri “Lachin”), unabashedly claimed that  the event “strengthened the participants’ ties to their homeland.” The visiting youth then thanked Deghati for conveying “Azerbaijan’s national heritage, historical memory, and modern realities” to the international community.

The exercise is pure propaganda staged for an audience selected to carry it home. Sixty-four countries’ worth of Azerbaijani diaspora youth were brought onto ethnically cleansed Armenian land and shown supposed “Azeri ruins” as contrived evidence of what was purportedly done to Azerbaijan–this, in the same season in which satellite imagery confirmed the demolition of Stepanakert’s Mother Cathedral, and while the indigenous population whose villages they toured remains displaced in Armenia. The “historical and cultural heritage” they were taught to mourn is, in point of fact, part and parcel of the sites of indigenous Armenian heritage Azerbaijan is still destroying. (Source: Deghati Presentation)

Azeri Turkish Plans for Regional Hegemony Become Unavoidably Clear as Aliyev Reveals Plans for Occupied Artsakh and Nakhichevan as One Territory

On August 11th, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev declared that Occupied Armenian Nakhichevan must be strategically developed alongside occupied Artsakh under a single “unified concept.” Master plans for cities across occupied Artsakh have, he said, already been approved; he instructed government  and private sector assets to continue developing “the creation of a dedicated master plan for Nakhichevan city,” which was recently presented to him along with “directives to execute further measures aimed at boosting the territory’s development and establishing “modern infrastructure.”

The “unified concept” Master Plan is blatant message not only to Armenia and Armenians across the Diaspora, but to regional and global powers that Baku is openly stating that occupied Artsakh and Occupied Armenian Nakhichevan are to be developed as one continuous space, physically and strategically, joined by the transit routes Azerbaijan, Turkey, Israel, and western powers have demanded across Syunik. Current Azeri occupied Nakhichevan is the tragic finished product of genocide and erasure: a millenial, indigenous, Armenian territory purged of it native Armenians, their cultural life and landmarks destroyed to the point of this Armenian land is stripped of every trace of its people and the world heritage (Djulfa khachkars included). Nakhichevan is the sinister template now being applied to Artsakh. “Master-Plan” and “Corridor” language dresses a single program of Turkish-Azeri colonial expansion in the vocabulary and false narrative of “infrastructure and development.” (Source: Unified Concept)

Occupation Academics: “Karabakh University Expands” Into Three Emptied Armenian Cities

On August 12th, what was the academic haven of Artsakh State University, now bearing the Azeri occupation nomenclature of  “Qarabakh University,” announced it is expanding to 49 degree programs across nine faculties for the 2026/2027 academic year. The degree programs are said to include engineering, business and economics, medicine, mathematics and computer science, education, natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, and the arts. New faculty buildings are being constructed as the same forces destroy adjacent Armenian indigenous structures and spaces. The new  construction aims to establish, what Azeri sources call, a broader “educational ecosystem in the Karabakh region:” occupied Stepanakert is to house Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences and Law; occupied Shushi a Faculty of Arts; occupied Ivanyan (Azeri “Khojaly”) a Faculty of Agriculture. The existing campus is advertised as offering modern lecture halls, laboratories, and research facilities, with a Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences paired to a University Clinic.

A university built across three cities emptied of their Armenian inhabitants is textbook academic whitewashing–a consciously constructed Settlement Infrastructure of the most durable kind. Faculties, clinics, and research facilities manufacture the professional class that makes an occupation self-sustaining, and the students drawn into those buildings will be taught, by the buildings themselves, that no one else was ever there. (Source: Karabakh University)

Foreign Interests and Actions in Occupied Artsakh

Atlantic Council Fellow Sells the Washington Summit to Baku’s Press as a “Finished Peace”

On August 8th, Ariel Cohen, Ph.D. — Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Managing Director of Energy, Growth, and Security at the International Tax and Investment Center in Washington, D.C. — gave an interview to the Azerbaijani news agency Trend praising the Washington Summit convened by President Donald Trump at the White House with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, claiming it achieved a “structural shift in South Caucasus geopolitics.” Cohen portrayed the current situation–ethnically cleansed Artsakh, 150,000 forcibly deported refugees, and encroaching Azeri territorial incursions into sovereign Armenian territory (among other humanitarian crises)–as “calm borders with no reported exchanges of fire, Azerbaijan’s lifting of transit restrictions and supply of petroleum products to Armenia, third-country goods moving through Azerbaijani territory, and ongoing border delimitation.” According to Cohen the centerpiece of this “peace” is the so-called TRIPP corridor — a 43-kilometer route through southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan, via Occupied Armenian Artsakh, to Occupied Armenian Nakhichevan, purportedly under full Armenian sovereignty with U.S. development facilitation—which he further claimed is on track for construction in late 2026.

Cohen credited the Trump administration with supplying what he erroneously termed “high-level political will” and a “concrete connectivity package” that reframed the dispute from a “zero-sum security conflict” into a “mutual economic win-win.” The agreement, he continued to argue, would  serve U.S. strategic goals by “diminishing Russian leverage” and “curbing Iran’s capacity” to exploit instability, while strengthening the Middle Corridor linking Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and Europe. He further claimed that TRIPP would end “Armenia’s economic isolation” and would establish Azerbaijan as a critical east-west transit hub. Completing the process, by his account, depends on Armenia passing constitutional amendments to remove “residual territorial language,” and on regional leaders containing “external spoilers,” specifically Russian and Iranian influence.

What Cohen’s “analysis” omits is the entirety of the Armenian case and Azeri war crimes. There is no mention of the more than 150,000 forcibly displaced, ethnically cleansed indigenous Armenians of Artsakh, no mention of the Armenians still illegally held as hostages in Baku, no mention of the cathedral and other sites demolished in occupied Stepanakert this spring, and no mention of Armenia’s forcibly disappeared. The route through Syunik is the same passage Baku has demanded for years as a “Zangezur Corridor,” and transit projects including the Middle Corridor act as fronts for Turkish-Azeri colonial aspirations and military expansion throughout the region. The demand that Armenia amend its own constitution to strip out “residual territorial language” is a demand that the Armenian state legislate away Artsakh and rightful indigenous Armenian rights before the dispossession of Artsakh and its vast resources can be adjudicated anywhere. (Source: Cohen Comment)

The Center for Armenian Research and Analysis (CARA) is a trans-national research institute that provides investigative, analytic, and informational resources to public and private entities across the Armenian experiential spectrum.