None of Russia’s neighbors could have thought that now was a good time to start a war, given the bloody spectacle of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, but Azerbaijan did exactly that on Tuesday, launching a “local anti-terrorist operation’’ against the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan might already have won, as fighters in the predominantly ethnic-Armenian region within Azerbaijan agreed to lay down their arms in a deal that was brokered by Russian peacekeepers on Wednesday. This could end more than three decades of bloody conflict, but given the dispute’s brutal history, that would demand uncommon self-restraint on the part of the Azeris.
The struggle over Karabakh has been ongoing even before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. There have been two wars, skirmishes, tens of thousands of deaths and bouts of ethnic cleansing by both sides.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev saw an opportunity to seize victory while Putin was preoccupied in Ukraine and hostile to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and the West was struggling to cope with another ex-Soviet conflict.
Illustration: Mountain People
This could have been achieved through diplomacy. Pashinyan already did the politically impossible when he publicly recognized Azerbaijan’s legal sovereignty over the enclave to secure a settlement acceptable to the country’s capital, Baku, earlier this year. Two sets of talks were on offer, with one mediated by the US and the EU, and the other by Russia. An agreement that gave Baku lasting control of its internationally recognized territory, together with protections for ethnic Armenians and returning Azeris, was within reach.
For a long time, it was Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians, backed by the Armenian government in Yerevan and its Russian allies, who were ascendant. They drove Azeris and the Azeri armed forces from the enclave, and in 1993 they also seized seven Azeri districts around it, mining the land and emptying villages. There were some wise voices in Yerevan back then who called for cutting a deal with Azerbaijan to secure Karabakh’s autonomy while the Armenian side had an advantage, but their advice was ignored in favor of more ambitious goals, such as independence.
Since then, a gas and oil-fueled boom in Azerbaijan has boosted economic growth, funding a rearmament campaign. Armenia was unable to keep up. After a popular revolt brought Pashinyan to power in 2018, Armenia’s Russian security umbrella began to look leaky. Baku struck two years later, recapturing the seven lost provinces and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Now Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s long-serving authoritarian leader, has taken a hard line by demanding that the enclave’s local government dissolve itself and its forces disarm, with no mention of autonomy.
Russia called for calm and mediated, but it might also have played a role. It has had peacekeepers on the ground since the fighting in 2020, but they have done little to prevent Azerbaijan’s blockade of the narrow Lachin corridor that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Food, medicines and arms supplies have slowed to a trickle since the start of the year, degrading defenses.
Pashinyan has complained that Armenia can no longer rely on Russia’s protection. He has also been building ties with the EU, and this year snubbed Putin’s answer to NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Earlier this month, after Pashinyan’s wife took humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Moscow called Armenia’s ambassador in for talks.
“There is clear breakdown in Russian-Armenian relations on many fronts,’’ said Thomas de Waal, senior fellow from the Brussels-based think tank Carnegie Europe, who has been writing on the Caucasus for more than 30 years. “There is fear in Armenia that Russia wants regime change and be using events in Nagorno-Karabakh to achieve it.’
In reality, the West had limited leverage. Although the EU accounted for 52 percent of Azerbaijan’s trade last year, that was the result of a huge spike in exports of natural gas and crude oil, as Europe sought alternatives to the sanctioned Russian supplies. Cutting off imports of Azeri energy would always have been unappealing, and is questionable in the wake of Aliyev’s quick win.
However, this is just the beginning. The ceasefire must first hold, and an agreement must be reached in talks that began yesterday, giving some guarantee of safety to Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians. The risk otherwise is another round of mass flight or ethnic cleansing, revenge killings and punitive justice. It does not bode well that Azerbaijan denied striking civilians on Tuesday, even as footage showed bombs landing in urban centers.
The future responsibility lies mainly with Aliyev and Putin’s roughly 2,000 peacekeepers. They are unlikely to be enough, and if Russia cannot do the job itself it should ask for help. The peaceful restoration of territorial control after ethnic cleansing has been achieved before, but that success is rare and not easy. Russia’s own record, in Georgia’s Abkhazia and Caucasus’ South Ossetia, is poor to say the least.
One model to follow could be the heavily armed UN’s peacekeeping force that was deployed in the 1990s to a region of eastern Croatia about half the size of Nagorno-Karabakh. The 5,000-strong UN Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium mission took administrative control of the region for two years, before handing full control to the returning Croatian authorities. The peacekeepers included both US and Russian troops, which were able to disarm and reassure Croatians and Serbians alike.
Without that transition, the temptation for Azerbaijan to solve its Karabakh problem by encouraging ethnic-Armenian flight would be strong. If anyone can influence Aliyev, it is his ally Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is gathering with other world leaders this week for the UN General Assembly. Erdogan has an opportunity to step up in New York, leveraging all sides to ensure that this long and bloody conflict can come to a humane end.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He was also an editor at the Financial Times, editor in chief of the Moscow Times and a correspondent for the Independent in Washington, the Balkans and Moscow. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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