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Since Azerbaijan banned international fact-finders from visiting Nakhichevan, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) employed remote sensing technologies in its pioneer investigation into cultural destruction. Yet remote restoration of Nakhichevan’s lost Armenian monuments or alternative measures of accountability fall short of unanimous approval. Armenian researcher Samvel Karapetyan, whose diligent documentation of remote medieval Armenian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh has been dubbed "constructive ultra-nationalism," sees Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian monuments as an effort to neutralize Armenian "historical rights" or antiquity-derived political legitimacy in the region. A groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones. Missing from the 522-page "Encyclopedia" are the 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones that Ayvazyan had meticulously documented. Scottish researcher Steven Sim had traveled to post-Soviet Nakhichevan to assess the condition of the Armenian churches photographed earlier by Ayvazyan. Today, the scholar Argam Ayvazyan - like all those of Armenian ethnicity and background - is banned by Azerbaijan’s government from visiting his native Nakhichevan. It is not just Armenians who have been affected by Azerbaijan’s government-sanctioned destruction in Nakhichevan. Armenian lobby." These were the words used by Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev - successor to and son of KGB-leader-turned-President Heydar Aliyev - to describe reports of Djulfa’s destruction in an April 2006 speech. In fact, the Aliyev regime’s controversy-riddled diplomacy promotes Azerbaijan as a "land of tolerance." In 2012, the European Stability Initiative described Azerbaijan’s generous spending on lobbying and attempts to woo foreign allies as "caviar diplomacy." This petrodollar-funded campaign has entailed various donations, including cultural preservation grants of undisclosed sums to the Vatican

Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church that, according to Argam Ayvazyan, was built in 1862 by the Araskhanians, a prominent Armenian clan from Agulis. Likely due to three factors - its noticeable position on an international border, reputation as the world’s largest collection of khachkars, and previously voiced Armenian concerns for its preservation - Djulfa was the last major Armenian site in Nakhichevan to be destroyed. In his own words, he was personally appointed to this position by Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of political Islam in Turkey and formerly a mentor to current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He reportedly witnessed the destruction of Agulis’s churches and quit his position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament in protest of the late 2005 demolition of Djulfa. Unlike the self-publicized cultural destruction of ISIS, independent Azerbaijan’s covert campaign to re-engineer Nakhichevan’s historical landscape between 1997 and 2006 is little known outside the region. Other Armenian scholars perceive Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian destruction as part of a larger agenda of realizing a vision of pan-Turkism: an ethnically homogenous Turkic polity comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, and their ethnolinguistic brethren across Eurasia. In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. The Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, eskort diyarbakır aimed to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging technologies. Photographs from 2006 taken from the Iranian side of the border showed that a military rifle range had been erected where the cemetery used to be, presumably by Azerbaijan’s armed forces, to rationalize the existence of the freshly flattened soil

An EP spokesman told The Art Newspaper that when the party tried to enter Nakhichevan, it was "opposed by the Azerbaijan authorities". For example, when it came to surveying the interior of Nakhichevan’s preeminent cathedral in the town of Agulis in September 1972, he asked an elderly local matriarch, Marus, to escort him to a potentially hostile encounter. From September 27 to November 9, 2020, Azerbaijan-with the support of its closest ally, Turkey-committed many atrocities and bombed towns and villages across Artsakh, including homes and maternity hospitals. Moreover, following his 2009 retirement, UNESCO director-general Kōichirō Matsuura joined Azerbaijan’s state-managed "Baku International Multiculturalism Centre" as a trustee, while his successor Irina Bokova frequented Baku for President Aliyev’s "World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue." Allegations of foul play lack hard evidence, however, perhaps except for The Guardian’s September 4, 2017 report "UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme." This investigative article by Luke Harding, Caelainn Barr, and Dina Nagapetyants cited questionable payments to Bokova’s husband. Their 2010 geospatial study concluded that "satellite evidence is consistent with reports by observers on the ground who have reported the destruction of Armenian artifacts in the Djulfa cemetery." In November 2013, dressed in the guise of a pilgrim to a Djulfa chapel now preserved on the Iranian side of the border, one of the authors of this article saw desolate grasslands across the river in Azerbaijan. As the last Armenian resident of a nearby village, she knew how to speak softly with the Azerbaijani community of Agulis. The Azerbaijani army began clearing the Jugha cemetery in 1998, removing 800 of the khachkars before complaints by Unesco brought a temporary halt. In the meantime, Yakup Ergun, the police intelligence officer who drafted reports about the jihadist activities of Büyükfırat as part of the counterterrorism investigation, was removed from his job by the Erdoğan government and later fired