2/26/2023 0 Comments Damp tinderbox![]() ![]() Over the past two decades, both Armenia and Azerbaijan – and particularly the latter – have grown much stronger as states. But it should be said that Putin has reason to be cynical. This cynicism, rather than active manipulation of the conflict, is Russia’s main fault. The failure there probably only confirmed the cynicism and indifference with which he is said to regard the Karabakh peace process. ![]() Yet Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s patron, successor and predecessor, has not continued the high-level diplomacy that ended in Kazan. When former president Dmitry Medvedev tried to forge a deal in a meeting in Kazan in 2011, he did so with the full support of Barack Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy. Each of them has said that the three co-chairs, France, Russia and the United States, have worked in close coordination over that entire period. In a decade and a half following the conflict, I have known half a dozen US mediators, representing the OSCE’s Minsk Group. Some Western commentators argue that Russia obstructs the resolution of a Karabakh peace process. This display of realpolitik and the on-going confrontation between Russia and Western countries over Ukraine mean that it will be much harder to see a concerted three-country push for a Karabakh peace agreement, as happened in 2011. Sergei Markov, Kremlin adviser (one time US employee in Moscow, and now Washington’s biggest bête noire), told Azerbaijan that only Russia, not the United States, could guarantee Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. In May, Russia made a new weapons sale to Azerbaijan, which the Armenian defence minister, through gritted teeth, called a normal development. It has strengthened its economic and security relationship with Armenia, which is now on course to join Russia’s Customs Union.īut Moscow also continues to build up its relationship with Azerbaijan, the largest and by far the wealthiest country in the South Caucasus. Its only military base in the South Caucasus (outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia) is in Armenia. ![]() Russia is an official mediator in the conflict and – in contrast to its much more direct involvement in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria – has interests on both sides. The cases of Kosovo and Crimea will reinforce and not hinder its march toward independence.’Įvidently under Russian pressure, Armenia was forced to abandon its tradition of ‘complementarity,’ and was one of a very small (and generally disreputable) group of 10 countries which supported Russia’s capture of Crimea, at the United Nations, along with Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It will survive and will be recognized as such in time. Hrant Apovian, one Armenian expert amongst many, wrote, ‘The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh is a full fledged democratic entity. David Babayan, adviser to the Karabakh Armenian president, called Crimea’s vote in March a good precedent for Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia’s roleĪrmenia immediately made its choice. The truth may be that Crimea has placed Karabakh in a new vicious circle of destructive politics. In this context, people are wondering not about whether Karabakh creates a precedent for Crimea but whether it works the other way round. The bizarre chain of events in Ukraine, in February and March, led to the Russian Federation annexing Crimea, tearing up half a dozen international treaties, and creating a new territorial dispute almost out of thin air. Either it was because Russians and Ukrainians were too intermingled and too similar, or it was that the Crimean Russian elite was too corrupt or too passive, but Crimea avoided conflict even as other Soviet-era autonomous regions were fought over. To general relief, the peninsula proved to be a damp tinderbox. In Crimea, however, the ‘Karabakh precedent’ was a dog that didn’t bark. In the early 1990s, there were fears that Crimea would follow the example of Karabakh, Abkhazia or Chechnya, and seek secession, thereby provoking yet another conflict. Following the Armenian victory in that conflict, confirmed by the 1994 ceasefire, Armenia has since carried out a de facto annexation of Karabakh, Meanwhile, the territory sticks to a declaration of independence made in 1991, but recognised by no one except its fellow de facto states in the region – Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. Then, in December 1989, the soviets of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh jointly declared unification. In 1988, the Armenians of Karabakh were the first rebels to shake the architecture of the Soviet Union, when, encouraged by their compatriots in Yerevan, they demanded unification with Soviet Armenia. Once the USSR began to split apart, that double allegiance was a recipe for trouble. ![]()
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