Armenians have been subjected to at least 500 years of oppression by Turks. Slavery, abuse, taxation, killings, genocide. Then Stalin, just by his whim, took part of Armenia and gave it to Azerbaijan. He did that quite often in many other areas, just to divide the people. BTW Azeri are Turkic people.
No wonder that Armenians are up to arms. They do not want another genocide/being forced from their homeland as it happened to them so many times before. Russia supports fellow orthodox Christians.
Nagorno Karabakh is like Kosovo, area of one country populated by people who do not want to be part of that country. We should clearly support them. I hope State department is doing some negotiating.
The back story is that this is Turkey’s continuation of their genocidal extermination of the Armenians who took the side of Russia in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.
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Armenia and Turkey are continuing ancient hatreds with state of the art drone warfare.