The famous New York Times wrote about the war in Karabakh.

Axar.az reports that an employee of the newspaper Anton Troianovski, and a photographer Sergei Ponomarev went to the administrative centre of the so-called republic in Nagorno-Karabakh - Khankendi.

"On the front line, the stench is overwhelming."

"In the trenches, there is fear. The Armenians are defenceless against the Azerbaijani drones that hover overhead and kill at will.

Azerbaijan launched its offensive on September 27 and began making small territorial gains, backed by intense artillery fire and precision drone strikes. Armenia’s limited air defences have failed to stop the drones, but its troops, bolstered by volunteers and conscripts, have slowed the Azerbaijani advance."

Outgunned, Armenia has thrown conscripts and volunteers into the battle. Some of the latter are veterans of the 1990s war, like Artur Aleksanyan, a retired special forces colonel who said he was in the hospital recovering from surgery when the current conflict began.

But this conflict is nothing like the 1990s, Mr Aleksanyan said. Then, the Kalashnikov rifle was the principal weapon. This time, there are few exchanges of small-arms fire.

There they are surrounded by craters where Azerbaijan has been systematically destroying Armenian tanks and other equipment, using modern “suicide drones” that loiter over a battlefield before diving down to an opportune target.

“They’re so fast that we can’t manage to hunt them down,” Mr Aleksanyan said. “I won’t say that we are not afraid. We are all afraid.”

“You knock down one guy, and they don’t run away,” said a soldier back from the front, Tigran Saakyan, dressed in a brown-and-tan knit sweater under his military jacket. “You knock down a second guy, you knock down the third guy, and they keep coming anyway - coming like robots.”