DANIEL WILLIAMS
Vladimir Putin, self-declared protector of ethnic Russian and other allied communities along Russia’s borders, failed last week to defend nominal Armenians allies who live in Azerbaijan from being driven out of the country by the Azeri army.
Though distant geographically, the Azerbaijan offensive was a byproduct of Putin’s failure to conquer Ukraine, where the Russian leader has also pledged to defend ethnic Russian allies. Such active solidarity is one of the Kremlin’s key foreign policy talking points.
But Azerbaijan took the opportunity of Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine to end more than three decades of war with pro-Russian Armenians living in the breakaway Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians are now effectively no longer in Azerbaijan.
Russia’s war in Ukraine seems to have played a role in the spasm of violence. The Azerbaijan government gambled that Putin would be unwilling to take on a new military operation, however small, while fighting a full-scale war in Ukraine.
Armenians inside Azerbaijan and within Armenia suspect that Ukraine had sapped Russia’s war-making abilities. “Armenia’s security architecture was 99.999% linked to Russia, including when it came to the procurement of arms and ammunition,” Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.
“Today we see that Russia itself is in need of weapons, arms and ammunition and in this situation it’s understandable that even if it wishes, the Russian Federation cannot meet Armenia’s security needs.”
In any event, Azerbaijan’s action is the latest of multiple, unexpected and negative events along Russia’s borders stemming from the Ukraine war.
Russia faces a new NATO adversary in Finland, which rushed to join NATO after the Ukraine war. Before the invasion, Helsinki, even if wary of Russia, maintained a formal neutrality between Moscow and the West. Sweden, shelving a long tradition of neutrality in Europe, is also joining.
NATO has also bolstered its defenses in Eastern Europe from the Baltic states to the Black Sea shores of Romania and Bulgaria.
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in St Petersburg. a
Central Asia reacted with concern about Russia’s Ukraine intervention. Kazakhstan, whose borders run 4,700 miles from the Caspian Sea to a snippet of China’s frontier, declined to endorse the invasion of Ukraine.
In a speech last year in St Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev affirmed support for territorial integrity generally and Ukraine’s in particular.
“This principle will be applied to quasi-state entities, which, in our opinion, are Luhansk and Donetsk,” he said in reference to a pair of Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia.
Kazakhstan’s deputy foreign minister, Roman Vasilenko, went further by saying his country did not wish to ally with Russia against the West. “If there is a new iron curtain, we do not want to be behind it,” he declared.
Russia’s government refrained from responding directly.
That left it to legislators and journalists to air complaints. “If we have friendship, then no territorial questions are raised,” said Konstantin Zatulin, a member of parliament. “But if that does not exist, everything is possible – as in the case of Ukraine.”
China took notice of Kazakhstan’s unease. Last year, when top leader Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan, he assured his hosts that China favors “safeguarding national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Putin’s use last year of allegedly oppressed Russian minorities in Ukraine as a reason for the invasion set off alarms in Azerbaijan, where ethnic conflict has a long history. Trouble erupted in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union, of which Azerbaijan was then a part, began to collapse.
In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, dispatched 25,000 troops to Azerbaijan, both to keep Nagorno-Karabakh from seceding and to quell Azeri violence against ethnic Armenians living there.
The USSR’s evaporation in 1991 set off a decade of civil conflict and violence spilled into the post-Soviet territory. Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence and Armenia and Azerbaijan made war on each other. By 1994, Armenia controlled 20% of Azeri territory. A bitter desire for territorial recovery and revenge among Azeris followed.
Thousands of members from both communities were displaced from their homes: Azeris from Armenian-dominated areas; Armenians from Azeri-majority places, with many forced into next door Armenia. Efforts by Russia, the United States and France to mediate a settlement failed.
In 2020, Azerbaijan’s government, fortified with oil and gas money, launched an offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh. After six weeks of fighting, Putin arranged a new ceasefire. Armenian territory was vastly reduced as Azerbaijan recovered areas it had lost outside of Nagorno-Karabakh, along with part of the breakaway zone itself.
Russia dispatched 2,000 peacekeepers to separate the Armenian and Azeri populations and secure a lone road from Nagorno-Karabakh to next door Armenia and the outside world.
But with its offensive, Azerbaijan’s government restored control over all its territory, canceled what was left of Nagorno-Karabakh’s legal autonomy and drove out ethnic Armenians.
An ethnic Armenian soldier fires an artillery piece during a military conflict over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, in this handout picture released Oct. 5, 2020. A
Russia’s peacekeeping force stood aside and watched the onslaught and ensuing exodus, according to reports.
The Azeri blitzkrieg had curiously mimicked Putin’s might-makes-right view of settling disputes. Last year, Putin blocked UN Security Council resolutions that called for a halt to the war on Ukraine. With its takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh and the ouster of its residents, Azerbaijan ignored resolutions from last century that call for ceasefires and negotiations.
As embarrassing as the outcome in Azerbaijan is for Russia, it is unlikely to alter Putin’s determination to carry on military activities he considers more important, observers say. Nor is he likely to commit any resources to reversing Azerbaijan’s gains.
“Karabakh is clearly an issue of lesser importance to Moscow,” said James Nixey, a Russian expert with London’s Chatham House think tank. “It is not a place like Crimea or Syria from which it is possible to project force. Russian resources are clearly finite.”
Putin’s action also inadvertently revealed the limits of trying to dominate his country’s near neighbors. Russia’s presence “was not enough to deter a rising regional power – Azerbaijan” from asserting itself, said Neil Melvin, a director at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. “The reality is that Russia has been weakening for some time.”
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