Travel Guide Latchine

Latchine, or Berdadzor, is only 20 km east of Goris, which makes it the closest Nagorno-Karabakh locality to Armenia... its only gateway too, since the Armenian defeat in the autumn 2020 war allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim the mountainous Kelbadjar district, stretching between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh proper. This means that the 8 km road linking the now very sensitive border of Armenia to this small locality of Nagorno-Karabakh, through the territory of Azerbaijan in which the Armenian region is once again landlocked as in 1991, has a highly strategic dimension for the Armenians, who have deployed all their efforts to control it since the beginning of the conflict in 1988. An umbilical cord through which Armenia had provided crucial assistance to its brothers in Karabagh in their struggle to emancipate themselves from Azeri tutelage, the Latchine corridor had become a route like any other for the Armenians who had taken control of the territories to the north and south, ensuring a territorial continuity between Armenia and Artsakh, secured, if not legitimised, by the Armenian-Azeri cease-fire of May 1994. Coming from Goris, apart from purely formal customs formalities, one did not have the impression of changing country, by taking the road leading to Latchine, renamed Berdadzor, and beyond Stepanakert, the capital. Since 2017, another road to the north has been competing with it, linking Mardakert in Karabagh to Vartenis in Armenia, with a3rd road, to the south, due to link Hadrout to Kapan. The latter was not yet completed when the Azeri military victory in November 2020 dispossessed the Armenians of Hadrut and Shushi in Karabagh as well as the bordering districts which they had controlled since 1994, restoring to the Latchine corridor its fragile status of exception While the Azeri regions surrounding Karabagh were to be returned to Azerbaijan as part of the international negotiation process under the aegis of the OSCE Minsk Group, to which Baku preferred a military solution, the Armenians do not intend to compromise on the status of this vital axis, which has been rehabilitated thanks to the sums collected in the diaspora by the Hayastan Fund. The importance of this region of Nagorno-Karabakh for the Armenians is clear from the fact that they fear that it will fall back under the yoke of Azerbaijan, which has been granting access to it only sparingly, and which has put on its blacklist those who travel there from Armenia, displaying its firm intention to regain control of it. Under the control of Russian peacekeepers by virtue of the Russian-brokered Armenian-Azeri ceasefire agreement of 9 November 2020, which put an end to 44 days of bloody warfare, the Latchine corridor has since been the subject of bitter negotiations between Yerevan and Baku, which is demanding in return a corridor linking Azerbaijan to its enclave of Nakhchivan, via Meghri, in southern Armenia.