Pleas for medical supplies and temporary shelters in wake of Azerbaijan’s military takeover of disputed region

Armenia has asked the European Union for help with more than 100,000 refugees who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan’s military takeover last week.

Armenia has asked the EU for temporary shelters and medical supplies, the Italian prime minister’s office said on Saturday.

The population of the region was estimated at 120,000, meaning almost everyone living there has now fled, according to reports from the United Nations and Armenia.

Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but is populated mainly by Armenian Christians who set up the self-styled Republic of Artsakh three decades ago after a bloody ethnic conflict as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Azerbaijan launched a lightning operation to take over the breakaway enclave on Sept 19, leaving at least 200 ethnic Armenians and dozens of Azerbaijani soldiers dead.

Artak Beglaryan, an Armenian former separatist official said: “At most a few hundred persons remain, most of whom are officials, emergency services employees, volunteers, some persons with special needs,” said.

He said the “last groups” of Nagorno-Karabakh residents were on their way to Armenia.

Thousands of cars and buses crammed with belongings have snaked down the mountain road out of Azerbaijan over the past week, and the refugees are said to be “hungry, exhausted and need immediate assistance”.

“We took what we could and left. We don’t know where we’re going. We have nowhere to go,” Petya Grigoryan, a 69-year-old driver, said after reaching the Armenian border.

The UN is sending a mission to the defeated breakaway enclave this weekend to assess the humanitarian situation.

Edmon Marukyan, Armenia’s ambassador-at-large, told the BBC that it was important that UN officials saw for themselves what ethnic Armenians had been subjected to.

“It’s good they will be there and they will become witnesses that these people were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland, from their homes where their parents, where their ancestors were living and these people were totally cleansed from this territory,” he said.

The Azerbaijani victory changes the balance of power in the South Caucasus region, a patchwork of ethnicities crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines where Russia, the US, Turkey and Iran are jostling for influence.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Armenia had relied on a security partnership with Russia, while Azerbaijan grew close to Turkey, with which it shares linguistic and cultural ties.

Armenia has lately sought closer ties with the West and blames Russia, which had peacekeepers in Karabakh but is now preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, for failing to protect the region. Russia denies it is to blame.