A court in Baku sentences fifteen former officials of the dissolved Nagorno-Karabakh administration on 5 February 2026. Five — among them the former de facto president Arayik Harutyunyan and the former commander of its defence army — receive life imprisonment; two earlier de facto presidents, Arkadi Ghukasyan and Bako Sahakyan, receive twenty years; the remainder receive fifteen to nineteen years. The charges, running to thousands of counts, include genocide, terrorism financing and the violent seizure of power. In a separate case on 17 February the former state minister Ruben Vardanyan is sentenced to twenty years. Armenia rejects the proceedings; Azerbaijan states that they are a domestic criminal matter. Amnesty International describes the outcome as a travesty of a trial. An Azerbaijani appeal court upholds the verdicts against those who appealed in August 2026; Vardanyan did not appeal.
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