First Nagorno-Karabakh War
This situation, however, had reversed in late 1992, when the Russian military started to leave Azerbaijan and shut down its bases there while in Armenia, the Gyumri-based Soviet 7th Army chose did not leave and now worked as a Russian force. Tracing back to September 1992, when Pavel Grachev, who was the Russian Defense Minister, tried to dispatch fifty six Russian observers to the combat zone in Nagorno-Karabakh, Iskender Hamidov, the Azerbaijani Interior Minister, condemned the Russian intervention and this incident helped the Russian Defense Ministry to become pro-Armenian.