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.