YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — The US ambassador to Azerbaijan, Mark Libby, visited Nagorno-Karabakh on Monday, May 6, becoming the first senior American diplomat to set foot in the region since the 2020 war and the subsequent exodus of its ethnic Armenian population.
Libby specifically toured the Karabakh town of Shushi (Shusha) together with his wife.
“I am so happy to be in Shusha today,” he said in a video message recorded there and posted on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “We have been preparing for this visit for almost two months and I am glad it has finally come together.”
“I was extremely impressed by my tour and saw first-hand how the city is developing. I look forward to continuing my travels throughout Azerbaijan,” added the diplomat.
Libby’s predecessors avoided such trips. The Azerbaijani government-controlled media said in recent weeks that he too is reluctant to travel to Karabakh fully recaptured by Baku as a result of last September’s Azerbaijani military offensive.
The offensive criticized by the United States forced the 100,000 or so remaining residents of Karabakh to flee to Armenia. More than 20,000 Karabakh Armenians fled their homeland during the 2020 war. Some 5,000 of them lived in Shushi.
