“On the second day of the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war, the Armenian military posted a video of one of its surface-to-air missile systems shooting down a surprising enemy aircraft: an Antonov AN-2 biplane.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a sign of desperation on Azerbaijan’s part that its military was flying a plane first produced in the Soviet Union in 1947, and today used mostly for crop-dusting. Azerbaijan had converted several AN-2s into unmanned aircraft and used them as so-called bait drones. After the Armenians shot down the planes, revealing the positions of their anti-aircraft systems, their forces came under attack from more modern drones.”
…
“it was also a hypermodern war where unmanned systems played an unprecedented role on the battlefield, and social media played an unprecedented role off it. Though it got relatively little coverage in the international media at the time — coming as it did at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a wave of global protests, and a bitter US presidential election campaign — it was in some ways a preview of the much larger war that would break out in Ukraine just two years later, and may yet be seen as the harbinger of a new and potentially devastating era of international conflict.”
…
“The Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute is one of the so-called frozen conflicts left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh, often referred to as Artsakh by Armenians, is an ethnically Armenian region within the borders of neighboring Azerbaijan. Violence in the region erupted in the 1980s when authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh demanded to be transferred to Armenia. (At the time, all were part of the Soviet Union.)
After the Soviet collapse, when both Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent, full-scale war broke out, resulting in more than 30,000 deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Azeris. The first war ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire in 1994 that left Nagorno-Karabakh as a semi-independent — but internationally unrecognized — territory surrounded by Azerbaijan, and Armenia retained control of some of the nearby areas. Effectively, it was an Armenian victory.
In the years that followed, the ceasefire was frequently violated by both sides and the underlying issues never resolved. Then on September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan’s forces launched a rapid dawn offensive, beginning 44 days of war.
This time, it was a resounding success for Azerbaijan, retaking all of the Armenian-held territory around Nagorno-Karabakh as well as about a third of the territory itself. At least 6,500 people were killed before the two sides agreed to a Russian-monitored ceasefire and only a winding mountain road was left to connect Armenia and Karabakh. (Though Russia, the preeminent military power in the region, is a traditional ally of Armenia, it has been hedging its bets more in recent years, particularly since the 2018 protests that brought a Western-inclined, democratic government to power in Armenia.)
Finally, in 2023 — with Russia distracted and bogged down by its war in Ukraine — Azerbaijan launched a blockade of Nagorno Karabakh, eventually seizing the region and causing the majority of its Armenian population to flee. The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh was dissolved in 2024.”
…
“What made Azerbaijan’s rapid victory possible? One major factor was Turkey’s strong military support for Azerbaijan, a fellow Muslim, Turkic-speaking nation that Turkey saw as a key ally in extending its influence into the Caucasus. Another related factor was Azerbaijan’s deployment of unmanned drones, particularly the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 attack drone, as well as several models of exploding drones purchased from Israel. These weapons proved stunningly effective at destroying the tanks and air defense systems of the Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh forces.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/351105/armenia-azerbaijan-war-combat-future-drones