In 1992, in response to the armed conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijan over the area of Nagorno-Karabakh the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) requested its participating states to impose an embargo on arms deliveries to forces engaged in combat in the Nagorno-Karabakh area.
The OSCE request has not formally been repealed. It is a voluntary multilateral arms embargo and a number of OSCE participating states have supplied arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1992. Other states did impose arms embargoes but in response to the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2024-2025 states reconsidered these arms embargoes. For example in October 2024 Germany removed Armenia and Azerbaijan from its national list of states on which an arms embargo was imposed and in October 2025 the United Kingdom did the same.
On 1 September the OSCE Minsk Process, the framework for negotiating a settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, was closed. With this decision, it became even more ambiguous whether or not the 1992 request to OSCE participating States to embargo arms supply “to forces engaged in combat in the Nagorno-Karabakh area” is still valid.