The Last Robots of Artsakh

I rolled down the window and saw two eyes looking at me from beneath a balaclava.

The soldier wore a helmet with a large white "Z" and a Russian tricolor on the side. He leaned toward the car and looked at my passport.

"Russian?"

I nodded carefully. The truth was more complicated. By origin I'm Armenian, but at that moment, standing at a Russian checkpoint between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the last thing I wanted was a long conversation with Russian soldiers.

The soldier leafed through the passport and suddenly smiled. "Oh, I'm from Moscow too. SVAO." The northeastern district. "Where are you headed?" "To visit relatives for a couple of days," I lied. He returned the passport, slapped his palm on the hood of our battered pickup, and waved us through. My wife pressed the gas, and we continued deeper into Artsakh along the mountain road.

Living in Armenia, it was impossible not to feel the war hanging in the background of ordinary life. Refugees from the 2020 conflict appeared everywhere in Yerevan: wounded soldiers, people missing limbs, displaced persons, traumatized young men drifting silently through cafés and bus stations. But the city itself continued to function with a strange sense of normalcy. Restaurants were full. Tourists drank wine in the evenings. The war felt simultaneously close and impossibly distant.

Artsakh changed that feeling instantly. In the weeks before our trip, shots and explosions at the border had been audible in some parts of Armenia. Videos of killings circulated constantly through Armenian and Azerbaijani channels. Everyone seemed locked inside overlapping realities of propaganda, grief, and the desire for revenge. I wanted to understand what life actually felt like inside the enclave, before it disappeared entirely behind headlines and geopolitics.

Late at night we arrived in the village of Mushkapat. Our host, a woman named Silva, climbed up the dark hillside to meet us at the guesthouse. She fed us immediately, poured homemade mulberry vodka into heavy glasses, and put us to bed in enormous beds under thick blankets, with that exhausted tenderness that exists only in places accustomed to war.

The next morning we met Ashot, the director of the village's new technology school. Mushkapat itself looked tired and partially abandoned. The roads were dusty. Old houses clung unevenly to the hillsides. Defensive positions and improvised bunkers were visible on the high ground, some reinforced with empty ammunition crates left over from previous fighting. But at the center of the village stood something completely unexpected: a modern technology center of glass and steel, as if someone had taken a building from central Yerevan and placed it in the middle of a frontline settlement. Inside were robotics kits, computers, 3D printers, engineering labs, and bright classrooms filled with natural light.

"They need to imagine a different future," Ashot told me quietly. Then he paused. "But we also need a prepared society. The threat of war hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles. If the next catastrophic war doesn't begin right now, the answer is obvious: we need strong people, specialists, people who will be useful first to the world, and then to their country."

Within a few hours the building filled with children assembling miniature robots, printing plastic parts, connecting motors, and testing homemade engineering projects. One boy proudly demonstrated a rudimentary tea-making machine. Another showed me a washing device built almost entirely from parts he had designed and printed himself. His name was Slava. He was around ten years old, and he spoke excitedly about America, universities, engineering, inventions, and a future career that seemed impossibly distant from the reality outside the classroom windows. He had built the washing machine, he explained matter-of-factly, during a period when there was no electricity. There was nothing to do, so he built it.

Svetlana ran a mobile technology lab for remote villages across Artsakh, packing computers and teaching equipment tightly into the trunk and back seats of an old Soviet Zhiguli and driving to settlements near the front line. She had grown up in a village that now lay in occupied territory, lost in the 2020 war. "At first it was a great stress," she told me. "For about a year it was very hard to cope with. But eventually I managed - friends and work helped." She said she believed they would return one day. "The pain hasn't gone. I don't believe it will ever fully go. But I'm sure that one day we'll come home."

A few hundred meters away stood the village's old prayer house, dark and nearly empty. There was no longer a priest in the village. When I asked Ashot about religion, his answer surprised me. "People here believe differently now," he said. As the conversation turned to war, something shifted in him and in the older villagers around us. Their faces hardened almost instantly. Stories emerged of relatives killed, homes lost, mutilated bodies, revenge killings. The hatred no longer sounded abstract or ideological. It sounded intimate. "If someone found an Azerbaijani soldier alone in the forest," one man told me matter-of-factly, "no one would wait for the authorities."

The technology school existed alongside an atmosphere in which another war already felt inevitable.

Later we visited the ordinary village school, a decrepit two-story Soviet building decorated with photographs of fallen relatives and local soldiers killed in earlier fighting. The classroom walls were covered with posters showing first aid procedures and civil defense rules. At the entrance stood a trash can made from an artillery shell casing. The teachers explained that children regularly take part in military preparedness drills. War here was not treated as a possibility. It was treated as preparation for adult life.

One of the teenagers, Elina, helped lead both the younger robotics groups and the local civil defense classes. On the hillside behind the village there was also a shooting range used for military training, including by local children. Nearby, the children performed traditional Armenian dances on the hillside. The proximity of these different worlds — technology, tradition, and military preparedness — was unsettling. The boundary between childhood and mobilization seemed almost nonexistent. When I asked Elina about the future, she didn't hesitate. "We should not ask for peace," she said. "We should strive for a victorious war." A few minutes later, walking back down the hill, she told me about another project she was working on with a group of students: developing a tourism program for the village, creating horse-riding routes through the surrounding hills for visitors. She described it with the same calm certainty with which she had demonstrated the rifle.

After lunch, Svetlana's old Zhiguli pulled into the school courtyard. She laid out her equipment in one of the classrooms, and the children gathered around her laptops with the same quiet focus they brought to everything else here - to the robots, to the rifles, to the idea of a future that refused to arrive.

Ashot found me later, as I stood outside the technology school building in the fading light above the hills. He had been thinking about what I had asked him earlier - whether any of it made sense given what was coming. "For thirty years," he said slowly, "neither the state, nor the government, nor the people thought seriously about our security, because everyone thought someone else would handle it. Only the army thought about it. But there is an inner security that depends not on ministries but on the mentality of people, on the nation as a whole." He looked toward the defensive positions on the hillside. "Many lives were sacrificed for this land. More than five thousand in 2020 alone. People defended it through suffering and deprivation. That means that today we must defend it - with blood, with weapons, without weapons, I don't know. But we must preserve this land."

One month later, Azerbaijan blocked the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Food shortages began almost immediately.

I think often now about those classrooms. About the robots. About the plastic parts drying beside the 3D printers. About Slava's washing machine, built in the dark because there was nothing else to do. Less than a year later, nearly the entire Armenian population of Artsakh had vanished, scattered across Armenia and beyond, into a diaspora with nowhere to return to. The technology school, the decrepit Soviet building with the shell-casing trash can, the shooting range on the hillside - all of it was abandoned. What these children had been building turned out not to be a future. It was a memory of one.