From the earliest days of war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, some bloggers and security experts noted key similarities between the situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk and that of Azerbaijan’s Karabakh and surrounding areas. In both cases, war had de facto created self-proclaimed and unrecognized republics, the separatists enjoyed quasi-unofficial support from a neighboring country, and popular desires have burned for liberating the occupied territories. Even the international platform for solving the Karabakh crisis – the Minsk Group under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – superficially resembles the Trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine, mediated by the OSCE and having negotiated two ceasefire documents in Minsk.