Brothers in misfortune Ukraine following Azerbaijan's path

Mikhail Gannitsky, Director General of the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, draws parallels in his article between the Azerbaijani people's experiences in the struggle for Karabakh and the Ukraine disaster. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Ukraine has a long road to normal life ahead: victory over the terrorist state, complete de-occupation of the territories, which the aggressive neighbour considered "its own" for many years, then clearance of horrendously huge minefields and restoration of destroyed cities, villages, infrastructure and historical monuments. Azerbaijan is successfully following the same path now and Baku's experience can be invaluable for Kyiv.

... The history of this country's people and lands was ruthlessly falsified by tsarist and then Soviet ideologists, Bolsheviks destroyed its short-lived statehood that was obtained during the First World War in 1918, in recent post-Soviet history, an aggressive neighbour occupied parts of its territory, proclaiming an unrecognised pseudo-republic, where all historical and cultural traces of the victim nation were systematically destroyed and where its language and literature were banned, forcing millions to migrate and internally displace.

It reminds you of something, doesn't it? Only the bloody apogee of this story is about thirty years old, the aggressive neighbour, in this case, is Armenia (but with the direct participation of Russia), and the country that survived the occupation and temporary loss of its territories, genocide, and ethnocide is Azerbaijan.

There is now quite an impressive Azerbaijani diaspora in Ukraine, which has been active in the Russian-Ukrainian war since 2014 (the Azerbaijani diaspora of Crimea is the only national diaspora on the peninsula that did not recognise the Russian annexation and publicly declared it in the spring and summer of 2014); many ethnic Azerbaijanis with Ukrainian passports are fighting in the Ukrainian army, and many Azerbaijanis also belong to the International Legion (Turk battalion) and the Territorial Defence Forces of Ukraine.

Azerbaijani volunteers often say that the Russians already deprived them of one homeland, many years ago, and they do not want to let them do it again. During the First Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russian troops openly participated on the side of Armenia, which made territorial claims to the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. That inhuman war has many parallels with the current Ukrainian disaster - in the early 1990s Armenian and Russian artillerymen razed entire cities to the ground, killing civilians by the hundreds, only to remove traces of Azerbaijani history forever from the seized lands. Subsequently, the invaders did not even settle on most of the occupied Azerbaijani lands - they were needed only as a buffer zone or as a source of quick profit (mineral resources or the property of civilians who fled from the massacre). This picture is familiar to every Ukrainian, isn't it? Only back then, it wasn't mostly washing machines that were being stolen, the enemies literally stole every stone from the empty houses, deconstructing them.

Azerbaijan came through the pain of defeat, mourned the dead and for almost 30 years, doubled its fists and clenched its teeth, has been systematically preparing to regain its own. For thirty years the Azerbaijanis quietly and non-publicly strengthened the army, purchasing equipment and ammunition from around the world, building the defence industry from scratch, training their soldiers in military skills and tactical medicine according to NATO standards, training their officers and planning the future Patriotic War, so that two years ago in just 44 days they drove the invaders from their land and restored their sovereignty over the occupied territories.

Alas, victory alone was not enough. The invaders left behind mostly scorched land, thousands of square kilometres of land contaminated by unexploded ordnance and mines. People eager to return to their homelands had simply nowhere to go. And Azerbaijan began the long road to recovery and reintegration of the recaptured territories.

...Ukraine will have to follow the same path.

Azerbaijan's ruin

It will hardly surprise any Ukrainian reading this, but the root cause of all the troubles in Azerbaijan's recent history was (as in our case) Russia. Having completed the occupation of the Caucasus in the 19th century and sharing the territory of the Azerbaijani khanates with Persia (now Iran), the imperial generals worried that Muslim Azerbaijanis would tend to separatism and get a powerful ally in the fight for independence in the form of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

The Russian imperialists approached the "solution of the problem" with their usual brutality and decided to settle the southern part of the Caucasus with Christians, thus creating a buffer zone between Russian and Turkish Muslims. As "Christianizers" of the southern lands of the empire, they chose a people that did not have their own statehood - the Hais, who lived in modern-day Türkiye (close to their holy Mount Ararat) and in Persia. Hai is the self-name of Armenians in the Armenian language. The word "Armenia", according to one of the most common versions among scientists, may come from the name of an ancient (which existed more than 2 thousand years BC) state in the north of modern Syria. The Armenian epos scholars conclude that the Hais migrated to Ararat in general from the lands of present-day Iraq - Mesopotamia. However, the official Armenian and Russian imperial historiography assures us that Armenians inhabited and even had their own state in the Caucasus in the early first millennium CE - but this theory is not confirmed by world archeological science.

One way or another, the last successful Hais' state-building project at the time was the Cilician state, a feudal principality and then kingdom that existed from the 11th to 14th centuries on the Mediterranean coast on the border of south-eastern modern Türkiye and Syria. Cilicia became an important ally for the Crusaders but was eventually destroyed by the Mongols and became part of the Ottoman Empire, where Christian religion became the basis for the preservation of the national identity of the Hais (some of whom left the Ottomans for what is now Iran, Persia). This historical experience, which implied aversion to Muslims, seemed sufficiently persuasive to Russian colonizers (in particular the ideologist of the resettlement of the Hais from Persia to the Caucasus, the diplomat and writer Alexander Griboyedov), and the process of Christian resettlement to the southwestern Caucasus, from where the local Muslim population was forcibly deported, began in the 1830s.

As a result, an Armenian Oblast was formed on the territory of Irevan khanate (Western Azerbaijan), with its centre in the city of Irevan (the capital of the khanate, a fortress city founded by the Muslim commander Revankuli-khan in the early 16th century). Azerbaijanis were gradually and steadily pushed eastwards by Hais from the late 1820s, with the patronage of the imperial army and officials. Irevan became known as Erivan by the imperialists.

However, the Armenian province did not exist for long: in 1840, Russian Emperor Nikolai I having betrayed the promises of the Russian crown, abolished it by a royal decree and abolished the special privileges of Armenians and the Armenian Church in those lands. After a series of riots in the Caucasus, in 1849, the Southern Caucasus was once again administratively re-sawed and an Azerbaijani and Hai-populated province of Erivan was established.

François Roubaud's painting "Erivan Fortress siege by Russian troops" (1827) and the imperial medal "On the occasion of the capture of the fortress of Irevan" (1829) show typical views of a Muslim city with a mosque

At the time of the collapse of the Russian Empire, in 1918, both Azerbaijan and Armenia (as well as Ukraine) briefly gained independence - the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic even managed to establish diplomatic relations with our UPR. In the context of the First World War and the global redistribution of borders, the ADR agreed not to contest the ownership of the Erevan Province, populated by Azerbaijanis and Armenians - giving it to Armenia, along with the central city, which later became the capital of the new Armenia, Yerevan. As a result, the outflow of the Azerbaijani population (who found themselves on the other side of the border from their people and the capital Baku) from there increased even further. Both countries (as well as the Ukrainian People's Republic) did not last long and were soon overrun by the Bolsheviks.

Since the settlement of the Hais in the Caucasus, first imperial and then Soviet ideological propagandists relentlessly falsified historical information about the region and the people who inhabited it (no less than the history of the Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language, which, as we remember, was at best assigned the role of "younger brother" and "dialect" - and in the extreme ideological convulsions of the Rashists, as we know, the Ukrainian language is a fake at all, there have never been Ukrainians, and our country was invented by Lenin). If you wish, you can read more about large-scale falsifications of historical manuscripts, chronicles and archaeological finds of the Caucasus by pseudo-historians in the service of Russia, which were noticed by European and American specialists.

Gradually, already in Soviet times, the Armenian party elites developed a demand for the expansion of subordinated territories (as the Armenian SSR was the smallest in the USSR by area and extremely poor). The Armenian politburo began to openly claim Karabakh - an Azerbaijani region rich in gold and copper deposits and sharing a border with Iran - based on fakes invented by Russian imperial and Soviet pseudo-historians (and the existence of a state border, especially with a capitalist country, even in the USSR meant additional opportunities for local ruling elites). These aspirations finally took shape as territorial claims in 1986-87, after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the late Soviet Union, having worked for many years in the entourage of Armenian party officials before his appointment as General Secretary. A public movement, the Karabakh Committee, was then established in Armenia (an unthinkable democracy for the USSR!) and openly demanded the transfer of the relatively rich Azerbaijani region to Yerevan's control.

At the same time, as USSR was bursting at the seams after the Chornobyl accident and the disgraceful defeat in the Afghan war, the KGB began to implement a strategy of local wars and frozen conflicts in the border republics so that it could use the army against civilians on the fringes of the decaying empire, increasingly disgruntled by the endless expectations of a bright socialist future under totalitarianism and food shortages (in addition to Karabakh, which became the first harbinger of this cannibalistic strategy, the world is sadly aware of the examples of Georgia and Moldova. In recent history, the Russians tried to do the same in 2014 in Donbas).

As a result, the Central Committee of the Communist Party gave tacit approval and the KGB proceeded to incite interethnic hatred in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Talented KGB provocateurs first organised Armenian rallies in the Azerbaijani city of Khankendi (a city in Karabakh with a large Armenian population), which escalated into spontaneous pogroms of the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijani refugees fleeing from ethnically formed gangs were 'kindly' bused to the Azerbaijani industrial centre of Sumgayit, where they told fellow citizens about the events in Karabakh at impromptu rallies, provoking a natural violent reaction.

Against the background of growing Azerbaijani discontent in Sumgayit, thugs led by the KGB agent, a three-time convicted Armenian (!) Eduard Grigoryan, who arranged a large-scale pogrom of Armenians (!) living in Sumgayit on February 27-28, 1988.

Incidentally, the Armenian Grigoryan was eventually officially accused and convicted of organizing crimes against his compatriots in Sumgayit. At the insistence of the Kremlin, he was transferred to Russia to serve his prison sentence, where he was released as soon as possible - and has been living quietly in the Moscow Region ever since.

Soviet OMON and then the army entered Azerbaijani territory to "restore the order". The fuel was added to the fire of the future war, it could have started right in the winter of 1988-89, but it was postponed by the devastating Spitak earthquake in north-western Armenia. As a result, the carnage started as early as 1990 and reached its climax after the collapse of the Soviet Union, escalating into the First Karabakh War of '92-94, where the Russian Federation openly took the side of Armenia against Azerbaijan, leaving the small post-Soviet republic with no chance of victory.

The result of this large-scale KGB operation was the freezing of the conflict, the loss of Azerbaijani control over Karabakh and the exclaves of the republic (Azerbaijani territories surrounded on all sides by Armenia), the loss of Armenian control over its exclave of Artsvashen in Azerbaijan and hundreds of thousands of refugees, up to 35 thousand dead, the destruction and devastation of the once prosperous region and the emergence of the unrecognized pseudo-state of Artsakh on territory conquered by Armenians and Russians (an analogue of the "LPR/DPR", a puppet regime actually controlled by Yerevan, an open corridor for Iranian drug trafficking and other contraband).

For Moscow, however, the main achievement of this entire operation was Armenia's complete dependence on the Kremlin and the Russian armed forces, permanently stationed at a military base in Armenia, as well as on Russian energy resources and fuel. Armenia has become a perpetual reliable ally of the Kremlin imperialists on the military and diplomatic front (e.g. now supporting the murder of Ukrainians by Russians at the UN).

With Russia's help, Armenia not only conquered foreign territories, but also won the information war against Baku completely. Yerevan had the full power of the Russian propaganda machine at its disposal, as well as a large Russian and Armenian diaspora in the US, France and Canada, lobbying for Armenian interests and spreading blatant lies about the Karabakh war. The "crucified boys in panties" that the Russian propagandists fed to the world in 2014 are child's play compared to the falsifications and systematic information work carried out against Azerbaijan. In many countries of the world, the First Karabakh War is still perceived as a "liberation war of Christians" against their alleged genocide organized by Muslims ("Bombing Donbas for 8 years", yeah right). Numerous international organisations and human rights activists regularly visit Azerbaijan in a vain search for traces of crimes against Armenians - but nobody has been interested in the past 30 years in the openly committed crimes against the Azerbaijani people during the Armenian conquest and occupation of Karabakh.

In Russian language and even Ukrainian language (!) Wikipedia, all articles on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations and history are carefully edited, and if falsification is easily refuted by authoritative sources - in this case events and time periods inconvenient for Russian-Armenian interpretation of history are simply missing (try reading the history of Yerevan, on the Karabakh war or on pogroms of Azerbaijanis - notice many blank spots, periods for entire decades, about which not a single word is written).

The Armenians have gone even further - they have physically destroyed all possible evidence of their relatively recent presence in Armenia itself and Karabakh. For example, they demolished a monument erected by them in 1978 to the 150th anniversary of the resettlement of Armenians in the Karabakh town of Aghdere.

A monument erected in 1978 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the relocation of Armenians to Karabakh was destroyed in 2014 because it was "undesirable evidence"

It became possible to restore justice and Baku's control over Karabakh and the Iranian-Azerbaijani border only 26 years later, during the victorious Second Karabakh War of 2020, which Azerbaijan now calls patriotic.

Incidentally, this point is also revealing: in the end, Russia betrayed its allies by deceiving Armenian expectations for serious military assistance in that war. Despite the fact that the Russian imperialists were bringing Armenian people to the Caucasus from all over the world, promising them prosperity in a foreign land and patronage in exchange for loyalty, in fact, the Kremlin, after two centuries of using Armenians as a battering ram against the indigenous Caucasians, abandoned an entire nation, leaving the Hais to deal with Russia-induced problems alone.

Dangerous soil

The first huge problem that awaits us after the victory, and in which Azerbaijan has more than plunged, is demining, clearing the de-occupied territories of explosives.

Karabakh is currently one of the most mine-contaminated regions in the world - but it is likely that by the end of our war, Ukraine will confidently take the sad primacy in this matter.

In Azerbaijan, in addition to the military, a specially created state Agency for mine clearance, ANAMA, is engaged in mine clearance of territories, which attracts both its own specialists and private contractor companies to dangerous painstaking work. Even assuming that more than two thousand people have worked daily for two years to clear Karabakh's land of deadly surprises (now there are about 500 deminers left, as the services of foreign contractors are expensive), only about 600 square kilometres of the roughly 10,000 square kilometres mined have been cleared, an area comparable in size to the State of Qatar or Lebanon.

The average rate of clearing the land of Armenian "heritage" in Karabakh is only 50 square metres a day per sapper. With a service dog, the deminer's rate of survey increases to 750 square metres a day, but in the end, it all depends on the density of the mines. The demining squad recalls that they once had to spend a lot of time on a patch of land on a two square metre road, where the occupiers had planted 11 anti-personnel mines. In addition, with diabolical precision Armenians mined mosques and cemeteries - the density of mines at such sites is so high that the territory can only be cleaned manually, no special equipment is suitable and dogs cannot handle it.

The demining process is slowed by the millions of fragments and shells that litter the local soil and make metal detectors react to metal, forcing deminers to scrutinise literally every square centimetre of ground.

Although the Armenian side has, under the terms of the peace agreement, handed over its minefield maps to Azerbaijan (for example, over 97,000 mines are marked in the Aghdam region alone), their accuracy, according to realistic estimates, is only about 20%.

To speed up the process, the Azerbaijani deminers called on science for help. The mine detection is now conducted by Croatian heavy machines with remote control and the latest drones: the Azerbaijani-Israeli drones are capable of scanning the ground to a depth of one and a half metres from the air.

Such technology would undoubtedly be of great help to Ukraine.

Dead land

Despite the Armenian occupiers' claims about the alleged historical ownership of the territories of Western Azerbaijan (and even the 'sacred importance' of these territories), the Armenians have brought only destruction and death to most of these lands, without even attempting to settle or build anything there. This is partly similar to the scorched earth tactics used by Russia in the Ukrainian Donbas - but, in our case, the obliteration of eastern Ukrainian towns is dictated by military necessity: unable to capture towns, the Russians simply destroy every structure in them with aircraft and artillery, and occupy, in effect, scorched wasteland, which makes no sense for AFU to hold it. In Karabakh, on the other hand, the Azerbaijanis were forced to leave villages and towns, their homes and farms in the face of an Armenian offensive under the cover of the Russian military, leaving them with the hope of returning.

...As it turned out, Karabakh's settlements, infrastructure and buildings were not needed by the invaders. Everything that could be looted and taken away was looted by the occupants. Everything of value was taken from the devastated Azerbaijani houses: furniture, utensils, windows, doors and roof slates. Nature itself did everything in three decades. The occupiers sold Azerbaijani houses to Iranians in areas bordering Iran - the latter came in trucks, paid Armenian soldiers $100 per house, then dismantled the houses down to their foundations - and exported the building materials to Iran.

All that is left of the towns and villages in occupied Karabakh. The places depicted in the photo were not actively involved in hostilities; these settlements were looted during the period of peace

At times it seems as if the occupiers were deliberately trying to destroy the very traces of Azerbaijanis in these lands. The cemeteries here have been maniacally destroyed: tombstones have disappeared from them, graves have been desecrated by looters - and most graves have been dug up in the part where the head of the burial should have been.

Araz Imanov, an employee of the Special Representative of the President of Azerbaijan in Karabakh, relates horrifying facts, supported by photographs:

- Thousands of graves have had their skulls stolen. During the Soviet times, it was fashionable to use gold prosthetic crowns for teeth treatment - so the occupiers used to steal heads to get these crowns out of them. We find many discarded skulls with teeth removed.

Looted Azerbaijani cemeteries. The photo shows digging under the graves

The occupiers had a particular hatred for religious sites. By the day of de-occupation, only two of the 69 pre-war mosques in Karabakh had survived. Dozens of photos and videos published online by Russian travel bloggers (Russian passport holders were among the few who could gain access to occupied Karabakh - just as is now the case, for example, in Mariupol) document how Azerbaijani mosques were used as cowsheds for domestic animals.

The Armenian side claims that all the animals in these photos are feral, stray animals. However, photos of the same mosques turned into cowsheds show that someone is closing and opening the doors for cows and pigs. And how would perfectly well-fed "wandering" animals find water in ruins in the middle of the steppe?

A cowshed in a mosque. One photo shows the closed door to the mosque, and the other shows the animals inside it

...The Azerbaijani city of Aghdam is called the "Hiroshima of the Caucasus". Here the locals, together with the army, showed fierce resistance to the occupiers, unwilling to surrender without putting up a fight. The neighbouring town, Khojaly, was surrounded by Russian-Armenian troops. Frenzied fascists under Armenian and Russian flags blocked the delivery of humanitarian supplies and the evacuation of people from Khojaly, and storming the town they killed everyone - as a result, 613 civilians perished there in late February 1992.

Aghdam remained steadfast to the last, like Ukrainian Mariupol or Volnovakha - the Russian-Armenian troops razed it to the ground with artillery and "Grads". Only one building in Aghdam partially survived - the central mosque with minarets: the occupier's gunners used it as a reference point for target aiming. The rest of the buildings are at best only fragments of the walls.

It was once the flourishing city of Aghdam, wiped out by the occupiers

Aghdam became a sacred site for the Armenian invaders - they tried desperately to take it because Yerevan and Soviet-Russian propaganda claimed that it was in the area of Aghdam that the ancient capital of a certain Armenian state, Tigranakert, allegedly erected more than two thousand years ago, was located. After the conquest of Aghdam, Armenian archaeologists made great efforts to search for any trace of Armenian civilisation in the area. Finding nothing, they "designated" as ruins of Tigranakert an Azerbaijani fortress built in the 18th century, and lost all interest in Aghdam and its surroundings. As a result, the whole region was gradually removed from the world map.

It should be noted that those who try to search for information on Tigranakert will be surprised - it turns out that there were at least four of them in the world. Either the mythical ancient rulers lacked imagination for naming, or various chronicles and manuscripts were hastily falsified by not-too-creative historians-propagandists, but the ancient Roman chroniclers mention only one Tigranakert (due to which there is at least some reason to believe in its existence) and it was located in the south-east of modern Türkiye, near the modern city of Silvan.

Return to life

Azerbaijanis are trying to breathe life back into their native Karabakh lands. They are trying to rebuild towns and villages in the places where their ancestral homes used to be. Piles of rubble left over from the walls of old buildings are forbidden to be taken outside the settlements being restored - they are tried as much as possible to be used as materials for new buildings: this is how the Azerbaijanis want to build a bridge between the past and the future, to keep the link between the Old Karabakh, destroyed by the occupiers, and the New Karabakh - into which life is slowly, gradually but inexorably returning.

Ukraine should also reflect on this philosophy of rebirth. Of course, it will not be appropriate everywhere - but its elements, which provide a link between the times BEFORE and AFTER the war, are important also in order not to forget about the war itself. And who started it?

Infrastructure is the first point that demands to make effort. Without roads, no one can go home - with this in mind, the Azerbaijanis immediately after the de-occupation of Karabakh began to demine and restore hundreds of kilometres of road and railway tracks. Perfect mobile communications were provided along the entire liberated territory. Two international airports have already been built in the liberated territory and several more are under construction.

With the roads available, the first place Azerbaijanis go is to visit the graves of their relatives. Where graves can be identified, cemeteries and individual graves are carefully restored.

This was once the village of Merdinli. Thirty years later, relatives can once again honour their relatives in the local cemetery

The final touchstone of the region's reconstruction is the building of villages and the restoration of towns. The Azerbaijanis are following to some extent the Ukrainian way of enlargement of the communities: where there were 2-3 villages they build one, but it is large and provided with everything necessary. There is a well-equipped medical centre, dentist's office, beauty salons, shops, pharmacies, bank branches, post office, restaurants, and cafes - in a word, all elements of a comfortable life, because of which villagers often prefer to move to the cities.

Houses are built by the government, offering those who wish to return to their historic homeland the opportunity to move in for free. The size of the house depends on the number of members of the moving family

All dwellings here are equipped with solar electric panels - in general, during the reconstruction of Karabakh a course on green energy is taken. And the local school, staffed and computerised with the latest educational technology, would be the envy of people in the capital.

Of course, those who move to the rebuilt areas will need jobs. In Azerbaijan, this issue has also been thought through - large companies are setting up branches and small production facilities in the rebuilt villages so that the locals will have something to do.

A medical clothing sewing workshop in the village

...On the outskirts of the still-abandoned village, a long row of farming equipment is lined up. This is neither an exhibition nor a shop: the harvesters and tractors belong to the whole village community, and every resident has the right to use them for their needs.

Such a comprehensive approach, which makes returning to one's homeland, where everything was once destroyed by war criminals, attractive, is exactly the kind of experience Ukraine will also need to implement in order to repopulate the depopulated Donbas. And it can become a vaccine against any ideas of separatism and collaborationism in the future.

People can sometimes betray their homeland, but they will not betray the land where they feel good.

The past as a vaccine for the future

Memory is another important element of restoring normalcy. Preserving for future generations evidence of what was done in the past, and by whom, in order to avoid repeating mistakes made then and the tragedy experienced in the future.

Ukrainians, at one time, neglected the lessons of their history, carelessly dealing with Russian cultural and economic expansionism and the preservation of Russia's considerable influence over Ukrainian affairs after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is because of this that the vast majority could not believe in the possibility of events in 2014 and then 2022. That is why many are still surprised by the unimaginable brutality of the moral freaks under the tricolour in the present.

Azerbaijanis have preserved traces of war crimes committed by Armenians and their Russian allies. And not only in Karabakh. For example, the ruins of residential buildings in which dozens of civilians with children died were decided not to be restored, and to make an open-air museum out of them in the peaceful Azerbaijani city of Ganja, where Russian Scud and Tochka-U missiles flew into residential quarters on the heads of civilians in 2020 (Ukrainians, unfortunately, then did not learn about this tactic of the post-Soviet occupiers).

Alas, there are many such "living" monuments to aggression in Azerbaijan. But there are even more of them now in Ukraine, and we should preserve this sad legacy so that no one else seriously thinks about "brotherly peoples" and a "common glorious past".

However, memories should be cherished not only for the pain but also for the triumph. In the new district of the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, there is a freshly opened Victory Museum, an open-air museum of Russian trophy equipment (used by the Armenian army), which is now extremely irritating not only for Yerevan but also for Moscow.

Not only have the tanks and cannons taken from the Armenians been brought here, but they have also recreated the occupier's system of fortifications, observation posts, sniper nests, dugouts, headquarters, and living quarters.

Looking at all these deadly scrap metal and concrete structures, you realize what effort and work it cost the warriors-liberators to restore historical justice and the territorial integrity of the homeland. And who your "neighbours" really are.

Now, of course, half of Ukraine is such a sad museum. After the war, it is important not to clean up everything. It is important to leave some painful traces of our tragedy for posterity.

...Azerbaijan is still not completely free. Russian "peacekeepers", which Azerbaijanis call "war keepers", are standing on its soil. Using its propaganda machine in 2020 and its influence in the UN, Moscow forced the international community to force Baku to allow Russian soldiers to stay on its soil. They are stationed near Khankendi, an Azerbaijani town predominantly populated by Armenians, and while ostensibly "protecting" Hais from potential Azerbaijani aggression, they are in fact covering up illegal gold mining in the region.

And this is also a good lesson for every Ukrainian: there can be no peace talks until the AFU fully restores control over every square centimetre of our land. Otherwise, history will repeat itself.