For the first time in over a millennium, there are no Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh. They survived the Mongol and Arab invasions and the age of empires, when tsars, shahs and sultans fought for this strategic intersection of trade routes …
How will Ukraine rebuild?
One lonely road cuts through the Azerbaijani town of Fuzuli. On one side, a cluster of decaying, vacant houses sit in a dip in the landscape, the remains of the original settlement. Three decades ago, it was home to around …
Iran is teetering on conflict
Europe’s web of alliances has always been almost incomprehensibly tangled. This is one of the reasons we still disagree so vehemently about the causes of the First World War: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand lit a fuse woven from a …
Has Putin sacrificed Armenia?
Yerevan
On a hillside overlooking the capital is Armenia’s last line of defence in the event of war. Squeezed between a junkyard and a Soviet-era apartment block is a dusty assault course littered with rusting cars, discarded water bottles and …