Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed the document at 1:00 AM Moscow time. The agreement, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, took effect at midnight on November 10, 2020. It halted 44 days of intense warfare between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The terms were not a negotiation but a capitulation. Armenia agreed to surrender control of all Azerbaijani territories it had held since the 1990s, along with parts of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, over the next month. Russian peacekeepers would deploy along a new contact line and the Lachin Corridor.
The news reached Yerevan before dawn. By morning, crowds stormed the parliament building. Protesters smashed windows, ransacked the prime minister’s office, and seized the speaker’s podium, declaring the agreement a betrayal. Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan was severely beaten. The opposition demanded Pashinyan’s resignation, accusing him of surrendering historic Armenian land. He defended the decision as necessary to prevent the complete collapse of the Armenian defense lines and the loss of Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city.
The war had been decisively shaped by technology. Azerbaijan’s extensive use of Turkish and Israeli drones systematically destroyed Armenian tanks, artillery, and air defenses, a fact the Armenian public was forced to confront in the ceasefire’s harsh terms. The conflict displaced over 90,000 ethnic Armenians from the territories handed to Azerbaijan.
The lasting impact is a frozen conflict under a Russian guard. Nearly 2,000 Russian troops now patrol the region, guaranteeing a tenuous peace but also cementing Moscow’s influence in the South Caucasus. For Armenia, the date marks a national trauma, a seismic defeat that overturned a decades-old status quo and unleashed a prolonged domestic political struggle over accountability and future direction.