The harrowing images of Ruben Vardanyan, who looks emaciated due to a hunger strike, have sent shockwaves through Armenia. From November 2022 through February 2023, Vardanyan served as Yerevan’s State Minister of Artsakh, a region better known in the West as Nagorno-Karabakh. In September 2023, after a successful Azerbaijani military offensive drove Armenian forces out of the region, Vardanyan was arrested by Baku’s authorities in the region. Now the former oligarch and philanthropist faces trial in a foreign land, along with 15 other members of the territory’s former political leadership. Repression against the Armenian leaders of Artsakh is both destabilizing the situation inside Armenia and fueling anti-Armenian sentiments in Azerbaijan, writes The Insider.

Ruben Vardanyan began his hunger strike on February 18 and continued it for 23 days, until March 12. According to him, the goal was to draw attention to the fact that “there is no court, but a tribunal.” Without independent legal representation, the trial, widely condemned in Armenia as a “sham trial,” highlights the gravity of the situation in which the Nagorno-Karabakh leaders find themselves.

After the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan realized the value of prisoners of war as a bargaining chip. In a 2021 video, Ilham Aliyev, in a conversation with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, jokes that prisoners of war became an excellent lever in negotiations—despite the legal protection they should be afforded under the laws of war.

While the political leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh legally falls into a different category, its function for Azerbaijan remains largely the same—a tool for pressuring Armenia.