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Both the Azeris and the separatist Armenians have issued dire ultimatums to each other to stand down. Or else.

Azerbaijan warned that it was prepared to launch an attack on Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert. The Armenians vowed to reclaim the land they held for 22 years and have just now lost.

Perhaps remembering the ruthless pogroms and ethnic cleansing that took place then and during the Bolshevik Revolution, the two sides announced an immediate truce Tuesday that has not yet been tested.

The earlier iteration of this conflict in a breathtakingly beautiful but impoverished corner of the Caucasus was where I witnessed deeply rooted ethnic hatred up close for the first time. When I drove out from the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, to the Azeri side of the front near Stepanakert, there was a Second World War-vintage railway carriage converted into a hospital where surgeons were hacking off limbs in appalling conditions. Other coaches were packed with the cries, whimpers and stench of the maimed and the dead.

It was a mystery to me how the Armenians won a crushing victory in the post-Soviet. The Azerbaijanis outnumbered them by more than three to one. The Azeris also had lots of oil. The landlocked Armenians were far poorer and had a much lower standard of living.

After several decades of high energy prices and no longer having to share the lucre with Moscow, the Azeris have been rearming themselves specifically so that they can get Nagorno-Karabakh back. It is a development that may have already shifted the military balance forever.