A military court in Baku sentenced Ruben Vardanyan, the prominent Armenian financier and former premier of Nagorno-Karabakh, to twenty years in prison on Tuesday, a verdict that Yerevan and international human rights organizations swiftly condemned as a politically motivated act of retribution against the ethnic Armenian population of the now-dissolved enclave.
The conviction on charges including "financing terrorism" caps a year-long trial that Vardanyan himself described as a "judicial farce." His family issued a statement declaring that hearings were conducted behind closed doors "in conditions incompatible with the standards of a fair trial under international law," and that their relative had been "denied fundamental guarantees of due process" throughout his 874-day detention.
Vardanyan, 57, served as Karabakh's second-highest leader from November 2022 to February 2023, having relocated from Moscow where he had built a significant banking and philanthropic empire. Azerbaijan seized him in September 2023 at a checkpoint in the Lachin corridor as he attempted to leave the region during the Azerbaijani military offensive that forcibly displaced the territory's entire ethnic Armenian population — some 100,000 people — in a matter of days.
His case does not stand alone. Seven other former Karabakh leaders faced parallel proceedings in Azerbaijani courts. Five received life sentences; two others were handed 20-year terms in a separate proceeding that concluded in early February. The pattern is unmistakable: Baku is systematically prosecuting the political and administrative leadership of the former Armenian enclave, using the post-conquest judicial system to deliver verdicts that critics argue were decided long before any evidence was heard.
Yerevan's Reaction
The Armenian government condemned the sentencing in measured but pointed terms. Officials in Yerevan characterized the proceedings as inconsistent with international legal norms and called for the immediate release of all Armenian detainees held in Azerbaijan. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's government, which has been navigating a delicate and contested pivot toward the European Union and away from Russian security structures, faces significant domestic pressure over the fate of Karabakh Armenians in Azerbaijani custody.
The sentencing arrives at a fraught moment in the Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization process. The two governments have been engaged in EU-mediated talks in Brussels aimed at concluding a peace treaty, with incremental progress on border delimitation and prisoner exchanges. The Vardanyan verdict threatens to harden Armenian public opinion against any agreement that does not include enforceable guarantees for the remaining detainees.
Human Rights Concerns
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both previously flagged concerns about due process in the trials of Karabakh Armenians held in Azerbaijan. The closed-door nature of the proceedings, restrictions on independent legal representation, and the absence of credible international monitoring mechanisms have drawn sustained criticism from European institutions. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has called for access to the detainees and for trials to meet European Convention on Human Rights standards — calls that Baku has largely ignored.
The Broader Stakes
The Vardanyan case has become a litmus test for what kind of regional order Azerbaijan intends to construct in the aftermath of its military victory. President Ilham Aliyev's government frames the trials as a legitimate assertion of sovereignty and the prosecution of individuals responsible for decades of illegal armed resistance. Critics, including much of the Armenian diaspora and a significant portion of European parliamentarians, see in the verdicts the architecture of collective punishment — an attempt to criminalize the entire political existence of the Karabakh Armenians.
The question of the remaining Armenian detainees — whose precise number remains disputed, with Armenia citing figures well above what Baku officially acknowledges — will not recede from the peace negotiation agenda. For the families of those still held, and for the 100,000 displaced persons now trying to rebuild their lives in Armenia proper, the 20-year sentence handed to Vardanyan is not a legal conclusion but a warning about what accountability in the post-Karabakh Caucasus is prepared to mean.
In the Caucasus, as across mountainous borderlands, ancient identities and modern geopolitics create intricate patterns of conflict and cooperation. The Vardanyan verdict will reverberate across the region's fragile peace architecture for years to come.
