Nine months of closed road, ten days of departure, and a caseload that will run for a generation.
Open the full chain →Conflict coverage · South Caucasus
Humanitarian Overview
The Caucasus carries the humanitarian residue of five wars whose fighting has largely stopped: displaced populations from three decades, missing persons whose cases outlive the conflicts that made them, some of the most mined ground in the wider European space, and heritage and documentation disputes that keep each conflict alive between crises. No single figure describes it — each displacement has its own geography, era and politics, and this module deliberately keeps them distinct.
Everything in this module13 analytical layers in this conflict
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Broad regional level only. Figures are agency estimates with their own as-of dates and revision cycles. This page never maps aid routes, facility locations or operational details — humanitarian data is presented so it cannot be used to target the response. Figures are agency and NGO estimates at national or regional granularity; no camp, facility, route or aid-operation locations are published anywhere in this module.
100,000+
Karabakh Armenians displaced to Armenia
~290,000
Registered IDPs in Georgia
~700,000
Azerbaijanis displaced in the 1990s war
~4,500
Missing in connection with the Karabakh conflicts
Tens of thousands
Civilian deaths in the Chechen wars
The Karabakh displacements — plural — 2026-06
Three distinct displacements, three decades apart, none resolved. In 1988–94: roughly 700,000 Azerbaijanis displaced from Karabakh and the surrounding districts, and some 350,000 Armenians who left Azerbaijan as some 200,000 Azerbaijanis left Armenia. After 2020, Azerbaijan began a large state-funded return and reconstruction programme in the recovered districts. In 2023: over 100,000 Karabakh Armenians fled to Armenia in under two weeks — effectively the enclave's whole population. Azerbaijan states returnees may live under Azerbaijani law; virtually none have returned, and Armenian claims for return, property and safety guarantees are unaddressed in the draft peace architecture. This module records each displacement on its own terms and does not net them against each other.
Georgia's internally displaced — 2026-06
Georgia's ~290,000 registered IDPs date mainly to the expulsion of Georgians from Abkhazia in 1993, with further waves from South Ossetia in 1991–92 and 2008. A generation later most remain unable to return; limited return has occurred only to Abkhazia's Gali district, where residents face documentation and language pressures under de facto administration. "Borderisation" along the South Ossetia line has divided farmland and families incrementally for years — a slow-motion humanitarian issue with none of a war's visibility.
Chechnya and the North Caucasus — memory and diaspora — 2026-06
The Chechen wars killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and produced a large European diaspora that includes both exiles from the wars and, later, those fleeing the Kadyrov system — whose reach documented cases show extending abroad. Inside Chechnya, war memory operates under a political order that forbids most public forms of it: the 1944 deportation is commemorated on the state's terms, the wars barely at all. Documentation of the period survives largely in the archives of Memorial — liquidated in Russia, continuing in exile.
Mines, missing and the long aftermath — 2026-08
The Karabakh conflict zone is among the most mine- and UXO-affected areas in the wider European space; Azerbaijan reports hundreds of casualties since 2020 in the recovered districts, and clearance — including HALO Trust operations — will take decades. The ICRC's most recent published list of people registered missing in connection with the Karabakh conflicts runs to some 4,500 names, with further cases from Georgia's wars; families' right to answers persists regardless of political settlement.
The detainees — a file that closed against the displaced — 2026-08
Through the negotiation, detainees held in Azerbaijan were treated as a humanitarian question capable of moving alongside the treaty. In 2026 it moved the other way. A court in Baku sentenced fifteen former officials of the dissolved Karabakh administration on 5 February 2026 — five to life imprisonment, including the former de facto president Arayik Harutyunyan, two earlier de facto presidents to twenty years each, and the remainder to fifteen to nineteen years — on charges running to thousands of counts and including genocide. Ruben Vardanyan was sentenced separately to twenty years on 17 February. An Azerbaijani appeal court upheld the verdicts against those who appealed in August 2026. Armenia rejects the proceedings; Azerbaijan states they are a domestic criminal matter; Amnesty International describes the outcome as a travesty of a trial. Vigil records the positions and the sentences and does not adjudicate the trials. What is not disputed is the consequence: neither the initialled peace agreement nor the Washington declaration commits Azerbaijan to release anyone, and the most negotiable-looking humanitarian file in the settlement has become the least.
Heritage, documentation and citizenship — 2026-06
Cultural heritage is contested in both directions: Armenian monasteries, churches and cemeteries now under Azerbaijani control, and destroyed or repurposed Azerbaijani heritage in areas formerly under Armenian control, are each documented and each politically weaponised; UNESCO access has not materialised. In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, residents navigate de facto documents most of the world does not recognise, Russian passports issued at scale, and — for Gali Georgians — pressure between recognition regimes. Documentation is where unrecognised statehood becomes a daily-life problem.
Border communities — 2026-06
Along the undelimited Armenia–Azerbaijan border, villages live within small-arms range of positions whose line moved after 2021–22; enclave and exclave questions from the Soviet map remain unresolved, and border delimitation transfers of 2024 displaced local anxieties into national politics. Along the South Ossetia line, detentions of farmers crossing an unmarked boundary are routine. These communities carry the peace process's costs in advance of its benefits.
Return frameworks — or their absence
Whether any peace architecture addresses Karabakh Armenian return claims and property, and how Azerbaijan's own return programme to the recovered districts proceeds alongside them.
Detainees, remains and the missing
After the February 2026 sentences and the August 2026 appeal, any release becomes an act of Azerbaijani clemency rather than an exchange. Watch for that, for ICRC access, and for whether the missing-persons caseload begins to close as part of normalisation.
Gali and the boundary lines
Documentation pressure in Gali, detention patterns along the South Ossetia line, and any change in EUMM's access.
Diaspora reach
Documented transnational pressure on Chechen and other North Caucasus exiles in Europe — a measure of the Kadyrov system's external confidence.
Each chain traces a mechanism step by step and grades how firmly each step is established. They describe conditions and imply no operational humanitarian coordination.
A line moved fifty metres, and the people who can no longer reach their field, their pension or their doctor.
Open the full chain →Access depends on:Caspian energy export — the westward pipeline system
Confidence: ModerateData as of 2026-08Sources: UNHCR data and reporting (South Caucasus) · International Committee of the Red Cross · The HALO Trust mine-action reporting · Memorial Human Rights Centre documentation · International Crisis GroupMethodology