FEARS for the safety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians grew today as the first refugees arrived in Armenia, following Azerbaijan’s brutal invasion of the breakaway republic.

Thousands of people have evacuated from the cities and villages in Nagorno-Karabakh, after Azerbaijan broke its ceasefire agreement with the separatist government and launched a bloody invasion last Tuesday.

After just 24 hours of fighting, the government of Artsakh, as the Armenian separatists call Nagorno-Karabakh, announced that it had capitulated to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s demands.

The separatist authorities also announced that the Russian soldiers placed in Nagorno-Karabakh following the six-week war with Azerbaijan in 2020 would escort anyone wanting to flee to Armenia.

The first group of about 30 people arrived in Armenia’s Syunik region today, local media reported.

Ambulances and Russian tanks also carried people injured during the fighting into Armenia, the country’s health ministry said.

Nagorno-Karabakh is located inside Azerbaijan. But Armenian rebels gained control of the region in 1994, setting up the largely unrecognised, but de facto, republic of Artsakh.

Most governments do not recognise the region’s independence.

In 2020 Azerbaijan launched an invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, seizing large parts of it.

After six-weeks of fighting, a Russian-brokered armistice brought an end to hostilities, and 2,000 Russian troops were stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh as a peacekeeping force.

However, in December 2022, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade on the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, denying basic food and fuel supplies to the region’s approximately 120,000 people.

Russia’s so-called peacekeeping mission, which was supposed to keep the road open, failed to take any steps to end the blockade.

Most countries did little more than issue calls for Azerbaijan to end the blockade. Many European countries are now reliant upon Azerbaijan’s fossil fuels after cutting off Russian supplies following the latter’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.

The fate of the Nagorno-Karabakh population is unclear. The Azerbaijani government claims Armenians will be allowed to stay there unharmed, but few believe them.

Footage posted on social media of Azerbaijani soldiers shooting at civilians has only exacerbated fears of a genocide.

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said humanitarian aid has arrived in the region.

“If real living conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh in their homes and effective mechanisms of protection against ethnic cleansing, then the likelihood is increasing that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see expulsion from their homeland as the only way out,” he said.