What happened
A court in Baku sentences fifteen former officials of the dissolved Nagorno-Karabakh administration on 5 February 2026. Five — among them the former de facto president Arayik Harutyunyan and the former commander of its defence army — receive life imprisonment; two earlier de facto presidents, Arkadi Ghukasyan and Bako Sahakyan, receive twenty years; the remainder receive fifteen to nineteen years. The charges, running to thousands of counts, include genocide, terrorism financing and the violent seizure of power. In a separate case on 17 February the former state minister Ruben Vardanyan is sentenced to twenty years. Armenia rejects the proceedings; Azerbaijan states that they are a domestic criminal matter. Amnesty International describes the outcome as a travesty of a trial. An Azerbaijani appeal court upholds the verdicts against those who appealed in August 2026; Vardanyan did not appeal.
The single largest movement in the Karabakh legacy file since the 2023 exodus, and it moved away from settlement rather than toward it. Detainees had been treated throughout the negotiation as a humanitarian question capable of being resolved alongside the treaty; sentencing converts it into a domestic legal fact that Azerbaijan can decline to reopen, and neither the initialled peace agreement nor the Washington declaration obliges it to. For this module it also fixes the shape of the whole legacy question: the war's territorial outcome is closed, and its human consequences are being closed unilaterally by the side that won.
Confidence: High
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