Deleted Armenian document proves deliberate exaggeration of Karabakh population numbers Historian Faig Ismayilov on his research that uncovered yet another Armenian lie

“Against the backdrop of the peaceful protest being held by Azerbaijani environmental activists on the Lachin road, the Armenian side is making absurd statements, which do not reflect realities, regarding 120,000 ethnic Armenians being apparently faced with a ‘humanitarian crisis’ due to them. We have asked ourselves the question of whether so many Armenians truly live in Karabakh. Seeing as there are no official documents that indicate that even 70-80,000 people of Armenian ethnicity lived there during Soviet times. In order to research this question we have turned to Armenian sources”.

According to Faig Ismayilov, an employee of the History Institute within the National Academy of Sciences, who talked with Azertag, the Armenian government instructed to conduct a population census in 2005 of the cities and villages of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO), occupied by Armenia after the First Karabakh War.

“The report was prepared in 2015 reflecting demographic information and statistics on the population of the communities in those cities and villages in Karabakh. The report, which included a time period until the Second Karabakh War of 2020, divided the population into two categories: city and village populations. According to the 2015 report, there are 13 city and 322 village populations in Karabakh.

At the same time, the report indicates the residential areas of Lachin, Kalbajar, Gubadli, Jabrayil, Fizuli and Aghdam which lie outside the borders of the former NKAO as administrative territories of Karabakh. It stated, that the Lachin corridor had been handed over to the control of the Russian peacekeepers on December 1, 2020. This document also portrays the population figures of the residential areas, which are currently under the control of the Russian peacekeepers, as well as the number of Armenians that have settled into the territories that have now been liberated by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces.

The report had been published in the electric library of Khankendi in 2018 by an Armenian official, Akob Germanyan. It was also published on Wikipedia in accordance with the privacy policy under the Creative License Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. The document on Wikipedia could only be used by abiding by confidentiality terms. It listed the names of the administrative residential areas in Russian, Armenian and Azerbaijani languages. The Wikipedia page was last edited on December 14, 2022 at 10:56 (UTC), when the population of Khankendi was increased by tens of thousands to reach 55,000 residents. The populations of the cities of Khojaly, Askeran, Ballidj, Khanabad that are located in the Khojaly district also more than doubled. For some reason, this page was deleted on December 22, 2022 but we managed to archive the document in time.

According to Armenian statistics, the Armenian population on the territories in Karabakh that are under the control of Russian peacekeepers accounted to 67,571 in 2015. One has to consider the fact, that ethnic Armenians left the territories they were residing on during the 2020 Second Karabakh War, every last of them. A part of them emigrated to Armenia, another to Iran, France, Russia and other countries.

After the signing of the trilateral agreement on November 10, 2020, the Russian peacekeepers forced Armenians to migrate from Armenia to Karabakh. According to preliminary data, the number of people resettled from Armenia to Azerbaijan by the Russians accounts for 15-20,000. Meanwhile, the main terrorist of Karabakh, Arayik Harutyunyan said that there were 30,000 Armenians in Karabakh in 2020”, Ismayilov told Azertag.