THE TIMING was impeccable. On November 7th, as the world’s democratic leaders lined up to congratulate Joe Biden on his presidential victory, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The two strongmen, overcome with nostalgia for imperial grand games, had some business to discuss. With America and Europe distracted by elections and the second wave of covid-19 for the past few weeks, they have been busily rejigging the political map of the south Caucasus, potentially shifting the balance of power in this strategic region at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East for years to come.
The contours of the new political map began to emerge two days later with a peace settlement for the region’s longest-lasting unresolved conflict, in the area, once part of the Soviet Union, that is centred on Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist ethnic-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. In the early 1990s, Armenia, aided by Russia, captured the enclave which it considered essential to its identity and statehood, and occupied the seven adjacent districts that belonged to Azerbaijan. The conflict was semi-frozen but never resolved and drowned in diplomatic talk.
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