evidence: In 1923, the Soviet Union established the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast—home to a 95 percent ethnically Armenian population—within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional legislature passed a resolution in 1988 declaring its intention to join the Republic of Armenia despite its official location within Azerbaijan. Armed fighting between the two republics, which have a long history of ethnic tension, quickly followed. Amid Soviet dissolution in 1991, just as Armenia and Azerbaijan achieved statehood, Nagorno-Karabakh officially declared independence, and full-scale war erupted. The first Karabakh war, from 1988 to 1994, resulted in roughly thirty thousand casualties and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. By 1993, Armenia had gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s geographic area. In 1994, Russia brokered a ceasefire known as the Bishkek Protocol, leaving Nagorno-Karabakh de facto independent, with a self-proclaimed government in Stepanakert, but still heavily reliant on close economic, political, and military ties with Armenia.