Vahram Atanesyan, a former member of the Supreme Council of Armenia and the National Assembly of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, wrote on his Facebook page:

“In politics, who should we learn from or at least get to know better? Azerbaijanis, for example, learned from us and created their “diaspora,” which, it must be admitted, managed to neutralize the Armenian lobby in both the US and Europe in a few years. It’s not even worth talking about Russia. We never had an Armenian lobby in that country, even when the nominal president of the USSR was Anastas Mikoyan.

Since the Russian-Azerbaijani escalation, I have followed the opposition forces in Baku, the social media posts, and interviews of prominent figures in the Azerbaijani exile in Europe. You will not find a single “note” in those speeches that Putin will overthrow Aliyev, and Azerbaijan will be freed from oppression. Everyone is against Putin, a defender of Azerbaijan’s independence, sovereignty, and national-state interests. No one is demanding, calling, or even urging Aliyev to resign. On the contrary, they advise him to follow the experience of Turkish President Ismet Inönü, who broke away from dependence on the USSR, chose a Western orientation, and made Turkey a founding member of the UN and a member of NATO. And the Armenian opposition is on the verge of begging Putin on his knees to abolish Armenia’s sovereignty, to appoint one of their own as a “governor-general” in Yerevan.

One of the reasons for the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh’s subjectivity, perhaps the most fundamental, is that several actors with more or less public and political authority were fighting not for the identity of Artsakh, but for being representatives of Russia on the ground.”