What you need to know about the deadly clashes over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
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Updated 9/28/20, 8:05 PM CET
Violence flared up in a longrunning conflict on Europe’s eastern edge this weekend as Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed over the embattled region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The fighting, which continued on Monday, left at least 39 people dead — the most serious escalation in years.
The two former Soviet states have clashed over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-controlled enclave internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, for three decades. But the conflict is more than a Cold War-era relic. Both sides enjoy the support of powerful backers and with the South Caucasus occupying a strategic position in the global energy market, the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan could end up reverberating beyond the region.
Here’s what you need to know about the latest escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia says that on Sunday morning, Azerbaijan launched air and artillery attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh, while Baku says it was conducting a “counter-offensive in response to military provocation.” As the fighting turned deadly, Armenia declared martial law and general mobilization. Azerbaijan announced a state of war in some regions.
The death toll is disputed. Armenia on Sunday confirmed 16 fatalities, with more than a hundred people injured. On Monday morning, media reports put the overall death toll at 39. Azerbaijan claimed it had killed 550 Armenians, which Yerevan denied. Armenia, meanwhile, claimed it had killed 200 Azerbaijanis. Both sides accused each other of killing civilians, including an Azerbaijani family of five and a woman and one child on the Armenian side, Agence France-Presse reported.
During the so-called Four-Day War in 2016 — to date the worst breach of a 1994 cease-fire agreement — more than 200 people died.
The Nagorno-Karabakh clashes have the potential to draw in larger powers — in particular Russia and NATO member Turkey, two countries that already support opposing sides in Syria and Libya.
Then there’s the region’s role in the global energy trade: The pipelines connecting Azerbaijan with Turkey are crucial for the European Union’s oil and natural gas supply — and pass close to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Christian-majority Armenia and Muslim-majority Azerbaijan have had frictions for centuries, but religion does not play a major role in the modern-day conflict. A lot of the blame rests with Joseph Stalin. The former Soviet leader placed the majority-Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh (known as Artsakh to Armenians) into Azerbaijan after the Caucasus was conquered by the Red Army in the early 1920s. Neither side was pleased, though for decades it didn’t matter much.
But when the USSR began to collapse in the late 1980s, powerful nationalist forces on both sides turned Nagorno-Karabakh into a powder keg. The enclave’s ethnic Armenians declared independence in 1991. War erupted between Azerbaijan, which insisted on the inviolability of its borders, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, who received support from Armenia itself. By 1994, the Armenians had succeeded in driving the Azerbaijani army from the enclave and large surrounding swathes of land. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee.
These days, the United Nations still recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan’s territory; no country considers the enclave an independent country — not even Armenia, which also hasn’t formally annexed it but supports the region financially and militarily. Since then, the two countries have hunkered down on either side of a line of control marked by landmines and snipers.
Armenia’s 2018 “velvet revolution,” which toppled its longtime leader Serzh Sargsyan, briefly raised hopes that long-stalled peace negotiations could resume. But Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the opposition politician who rose to power after the mass protests, largely ended up sticking by his predecessor’s rhetoric.
An election organized this spring by the self-declared Armenian government in Karabakh was viewed as a provocation in Azerbaijan and drew international criticism. And in July this year, tensions started surging after a series of clashes killed more than a dozen people, with the catalyst still remaining unclear. The fighting prompted thousands of Azerbaijanis to demonstrate for war with Armenia; at the same time, Turkey ratcheted up its rhetoric in support of Baku.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has urged “an immediate cessation of hostilities,” a call echoed by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations.
Turkey sided firmly with Azerbaijan, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan describing Armenia as “the biggest threat to peace” in the region. Russia took a more cautious approach: In a phone call with Armenia’s Pashinyan, President Vladimir Putin said it was important to “halt military actions,” according to the Kremlin’s account of the conversation.
Iran — an ally of Armenia — offered to mediate, saying Tehran was “ready to use all its capacities to help talks to start between the two sides.”
For more than a quarter-century, an international peace initiative, known as the Minsk Process, has tried and failed to bring a resolution to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh after the cease-fire in the region in 1994.
Chaired by France, Russia and the United States, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Minsk Group has sought to prevent military clashes and to implement a peace settlement.
But years of diplomatic meetings and various missions to the region, as well as to the capitals of Armenia and Azerbaijan, have come to naught.
There were brief flickers of hope after Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met formally for the first time in March 2019, and later in February 2020 for a public debate at the Munich Security Conference. For years, Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders had refused to even appear in the same room. But the coronavirus pandemic interrupted diplomatic efforts earlier this year.
On Sunday, the Minsk Group co-chairs issued a statement decrying the latest violence.
It’s too early to say how long the fighting will continue or whether it could escalate into a full-blown war. Both the 2016 clashes and the skirmishes in July lasted only a few days.
The picture would change significantly if a major power were to enter the conflict — yet even Turkey has so far limited its involvement to rhetoric. Armenia has claimed Ankara has redeployed fighters from northern Syria to Azerbaijan, but Baku issued a swift denial.
New Armenia-Azerbaijan fighting a long time in the making
When wide-scale fighting broke out over the weekend between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces, it did not come as a surprise.
For the last three months, tensions between the two sides have been rising steadily. All signs appeared to be pointing to the conclusion that Azerbaijan was preparing the ground for the most serious attempt yet to right what it sees as a deep injustice: the seizure of a large part of its territory, and the resulting displacement of more than 600,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis, by Armenian forces during a war as the Soviet Union collapsed.
In July, an as-yet-unexplained clash on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted into the conflict’s heaviest fighting in years. Both sides blamed the other for starting the fighting, and more than two months on it remains unclear what actually sparked it. The majority opinion among regional experts is that it was probably an accident that got out of hand and that neither side intended to start it.
But the burst of fighting seemed to accelerate processes that had been long developing.
Days after the skirmishes started, a massive, unprecedented demonstration demanding war broke out in Baku following the funeral of a military officer killed in the battle. The demonstration, with tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis chanting pro-war slogans, brought into the open a widespread nationalist, anti-government sentiment in the country. Many Azerbaijanis blame their government for being full of talk when it comes to taking back Karabakh, but with little action to show for it.
Azerbaijan’s authoritarian government brooks no dissent but it also is deeply sensitive to public opinion. It has repeatedly made concessions on economic issues when social media discontent breaks out. While government officials tried to portray the demonstrations as largely patriotic and pro-government, they surely were aware, and frightened, of the truth.
The July fighting also brought a shift in the delicate geopolitics of the conflict. While Turkey had always been a supporter of Azerbaijan, that support was relatively shallow; Azerbaijan still got the majority of its weapons from Russia.
Following the July conflict Turkey’s involvement became much deeper than it had previously been, with unprecedentedly bellicose rhetoric coming from Ankara and repeated high-level visits between the two sides. Ankara appeared to see the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as yet another arena in which to exercise its growing foreign policy ambitions, while appealing to a nationalist, anti-Armenian bloc in Turkey’s domestic politics.
Turkey’s tighter embrace, in turn, gave Baku the confidence to take a tougher line against Russia, Armenia’s closest ally in the conflict but which maintains close ties with both countries. Azerbaijan heavily publicized (still unconfirmed) reports about large Russian weapons shipments to Armenia just following the fighting, and President Ilham Aliyev personally complained to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Other – also unconfirmed – reports fanned in the pro-government Azerbaijani press accused Georgia of allowing Serbian arms shipments to transit its territory en route to Armenia. Whether or not any of these reports were true, the strategy appeared to be to throw up diplomatic complications for Armenia to get arms resupplies.
And all of this took place against the backdrop of Baku’s disappointed expectations of the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. When Pashinyan came to power in 2018, he deposed the former regime that had been vilified in Azerbaijan as the “Karabakh clan,” for the leading roles that its senior officials played in the 1990s war.
Pashinyan appeared to be a fresh face who could give a new impetus to the long-stalled peace negotiations between the two sides. But as time went on, he adopted the same uncompromising positions as his predecessors and on occasion rhetorically went even further, most controversially saying at a speech in Karabakh that “Karabakh is Armenia – period.”
The dashed expectations from Pashinyan appeared to create the sense in Baku that the peace negotiations were never going to yield any fruit, and that force would be the only means for Azerbaijan to regain its territories. Following the July fighting, the negotiations – already slowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic – effectively ceased.
In the two weeks or so before the conflict, there were several developments that made it appear that Baku was laying the ground for a heavy offensive. There was an unusual mobilization of reserve soldiers, and strange reports about the government seizing civilian pickup trucks for possible military use. Dubious reports from unlikely sources about Armenia importing militias from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were widely spread in Azerbaijan.
Some developments were more explicit: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a long list of “provocations” that the Armenian side had committed since Pashinyan came to power, a document that appeared aimed at an international diplomatic audience. Aliyev demanded a specific timetable for Armenian withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territories it controls, an unprecedented condition that he knew the Armenians would never fulfill.
The situation was dire enough that the U.S. embassies in Baku and Yerevan both issued statements on September 25 warning Americans to steer clear of border areas.
When fighting broke out early in the morning of September 27, Aliyev said in an address to the nation that it was a “counter-offensive” undertaken “in response to military provocation” by Armenia. But it was a thin pretext that he didn’t bother to explain further. “I am confident that our successful counter-offensive will end the occupation! It will end injustice! It will end the occupation that has lasted for nearly 30 years!” he said.
Armenia-Azerbaijan clashes: US, others must intervene as conflict escalates, experts say
Why Are Armenia and Azerbaijan Fighting Again? Fresno-Based Consul Speaks Out
Armenia and Azerbaijani forces kept fighting Monday in the disputed mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been in a tense state of limbo since a 1994 truce between the two countries
Both sides blame each other for resuming the deadly attacks that reportedly have killed and wounded scores of people.
The recurring conflict is of concern to Fresno’s large population of residents with Armenian heritage. Berj Apkarian, Honorary Consul of the Republic on Armenia in Fresno, told KSEE24, “It’s not a surprise, we were anticipating this to come.”
“Historically, the conflict has been between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” Apkarian said. “Now, Turkey is playing a very critical role in escalating the situation and causing instability in that region.
“All of a sudden the Azeri government is indicating that they do not want to engage in peace talks. They want to liberate the occupied territories.”
Apkarian said Armenia is committed to a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The renewed hostilities broke out on Sunday morning. The European Union on Monday urged both sides to halt the fighting and return to the negotiating table, following similar calls by Iran, Russia, France and the United States.
The Associated Press explains what’s behind the long-unresolved conflict:
Karabakh is a region within Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since the 1994 end of a full-scale separatist war that killed about 30,000 people and displaced an estimated 1 million.
Nagorno-Karabakh proper has an area of about 1,700 square miles — about the size of the state of Delaware — but Armenian forces occupy large swaths of adjacent territory.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a region within Azerbaijan that has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since 1994. (Shutterstock)
Long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azeris began boiling over as the Soviet Union frayed in its final years. Once the USSR collapsed in 1991 and the republics became independent nations, war broke out.
A 1994 cease-fire left Armenian and Azerbaijani forces facing each other across a demilitarized zone, where clashes were frequently reported.
In this handout photo taken from a footage released by Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020, Azerbaijan’s forces destroy Armenian anti-aircraft system at the contact line of the self-proclaimed Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan. Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out Sunday around the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian Defense Ministry said two Azerbaijani helicopters were shot down. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said in a televised address to the nation that “there are losses among the Azerbaijani forces and the civilian population as a result of the Armenian bombardment” but did not give further details. (Armenian’s Defense Ministry via AP)
International mediation efforts to determine the region’s final status have brought little visible progress.
The conflict has been an economic blow to the Caucasus region because it has hampered trade and prompted Turkey to close its border with landlocked Armenia.
Fighting periodically breaks out around Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders, often deadly, notably in 2016 and this July. Since new fighting erupted Sunday, dozens have been killed and wounded in apparent shelling by both sides. Each country blamed the other for sparking the clashes.
In addition to causing local casualties and damage, the conflict in the small, hard-to-reach region is also of concern to major regional players.
Orthodox Christian Russia is Armenia’s main economic partner and has a military base there, while Turkey has offered support to Azerbaijanis, ethnic brethren to Turks and fellow Muslims. Iran neighbors both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is calling for calm.
Meanwhile, the United States, France and Russia are meant to be guarantors of the long-stalled peace process, under the auspices of the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
VoA: Turkey Vows Support for Azerbaijan in Escalating Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict
Monday saw Azeri and Armenian forces exchange heavy artillery fire, with each accusing the other of starting the hostilities Sunday. Observers called the latest fighting over Nargono Karabakh, an enclave inside Azerbaijan but run by ethnic Armenians, the worst since the 1990s.
Witness reports put the number of dead, including civilians, at more than 20 and at least 100 wounded.
People watch TV in a bomb shelter in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, in this picture released Sept. 28, 2020. (Foreign Ministry of Armenia/Handout via Reuters)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quick to voice support for Azerbaijan, labeling Armenia “the biggest threat to peace in the region.” The Turkish leader called on “the entire world to stand with Azerbaijan in their battle against invasion and cruelty.”
The Armenian foreign ministry on Monday said Turkish military “experts” were “fighting side by side with Azerbaijan.” Turkish government officials declined to comment on the accusations.
“Turkey troops will not be on the front line, Azeri forces don’t need them,” said Turkish analyst Ilhan Uzgel. But Uzgel says Ankara remains Baku’s key military ally.
“Turkey is already supporting Azerbaijan militarily,” he said, “through technical assistance through arms sales, providing critical military support, especially in terms of armed drones and technical expertise. The line for Turkey’s involvement, is Russia’s involvement; actually, that is a red line for Turkey. Turkey doesn’t want a direct confrontation with Moscow.”
An image from a video made available on the website of the Azerbaijani Defence Ministry on Sept. 28, 2020, allegedly shows Azeri troops conducting a combat operation during clashes between Armenian separatists and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Moscow is a vital supporter of Yerevan, and maintains a military base in Armenia.
The Russian foreign ministry on Monday called for Armenia and Azerbaijan to exercise restraint.
“Armenian-Russian relations are firm and solid,” said Dr. Zaur Gasimov, a Russian affairs expert at Germany’s Bonn University. “Now, having faced with casualties on the front line, Yerevan would search for more support from Moscow.”
Ahead of Sunday’s outbreak of fighting, Baku had accused Moscow of emboldening Yerevan with significant arms shipments since July.
“500 tonnes of military cargo has been delivered to Armenia. Let us be clear, from Russia,” said Hikmat Hajiyev, head of Azerbaijan department of foreign affairs, in a briefing to foreign journalists in Turkey earlier this month.
Hajiyev highlighted the significance of Turkey’s military assistance. “We have seen firm and strong support of Turkey to Azerbaijan. Annually, we have 10 joint military exercises covering land troops, anti-terror special forces operations, and air force exercises.”
In what observers interpreted as a message to Armenia, Turkish fighter jets carried out an exercise in Azerbaijan shortly after Armenian and Azeri forces clashed in July.
Energy interests
July’s fighting in Azerbaijan’s Tovuz region was close to crucial energy pipelines that serve Turkey, causing alarm in Ankara.
“This is a very core security issue for Turkey for energy security,” said a senior Turkish energy ministry official speaking to journalists on the condition of anonymity. The official said Turkey “will take any relevant measures” to continue receiving energy deliveries from Azerbaijan.
Ankara has long supported Baku in its efforts to retake Nagorno-Karabakh, and Erdogan on Monday asserted that if Armenia immediately leaves the territory that he said it is occupying, the region will return to peace and harmony.
A view of a house said to have been damaged in recent shelling during clashes between Armenian separatists and Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region, Sept. 28, 2020. (Handout Photo from Armenian Foreign Ministry)
Restoring Azeri control over Nagorno-Karabakh has the strong support of Turkish nationalists, a critical political base for Erdogan.
“Two nations, one people” is a popular mantra used by Baku and Ankara to describe the countries’ relationship.
Armenian separatists seized Nargono Karabakh from Azerbaijan in a bloody 1990s war that killed an estimated 30,000 people.
Turkey appears poised to deepen its cooperation with Azerbaijan, analysts say.
“But it’s quite a risky area. The Caucasus, it’s one of Russia’s near abroad, the Caucuses is part of Russian area of influence. They may not tolerate Turkish Azerbaijani military action against Armenia that results in heavy Armenian losses. If Turkey and Azerbaijan are planning to have a huge success through military means, that could put Turkish Russian relations at serious risk.”
In recent years, Ankara and Moscow have deepened their relationship, cooperating in Syria and building trade ties that even extend to the purchase of sophisticated Russian military hardware.
Turkish Drones Over Nagorno-Karabakh—And Other Updates From A Day-Old War
Turkey has openly asserted its support for the Azerbaijani offensive, while Russia is officially allied with Armenia.
You can read this earlier article to learn more about the events leading up to the current escalation, and the reports emerging from the war zone.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have released combat footage in a bid to influence the narrative of who is “winning” the conflict.
Armenian military sources have released extensive footage depicting damage or destruction of Armenian tanks and armored vehicles by ground forces. Azerbaijan, by contrast, has primarily released videos of drone strikes picking off air defense and armored vehicles.
This by itself is not a new phenomenon. Azerbaijan earlier purchased a variety of advanced unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) from Israel, and in 2016 was the first nation to use a kamikaze drone in combat when it crashed a Harops loitering munition into a bus full of Armenian militia. These drones were again active during fighting July 2020.
However, the drone strike footage shared by the Azerbaijan Ministry of Defense in September showed something different—an interface which appears identical to the TB2 Bayraktar UCAV drone employed by Turkey.
Turkey has used the Bayraktar aggressively in conflicts Libya and Syria in 2020, with operationally decisive results. Though opposing surface-to-air missiles shot down a significant number of drones, the Turkish UCAVs in turn still managed to methodically pick off (manned) air defense vehicles one by one.
And once the air defenses were suppressed, Turkish drones could ravage enemy bases, artillery positions and vehicle columns unhindered with lightweight precision missiles.
It doesn’t take a master of forensics to spot why the video released by Azerbaijan’s MoD looks very much like it’s coming from a TB2. Consider the following footage of Turkish military TB2 strikes in Syria and Libya.
Both sides claim to have inflicted considerable material and personnel losses on their adversaries, while conceding only to much lighter losses of their own. Such discrepancies arise both organically from the “fog of war” as well as deliberate exaggeration in an effort to win the propaganda war.
Azerbaijan’s MoD claims its forces have destroyed 22 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, 15 Osa or Tor short-range air defense systems, 18 drones, eight artillery systems (towed and/or self-propelled) and three ammunition depots, and to have inflicted 550 Armenian killed or wounded.
The NKR has admitted to a total of 31 soldiers killed—an earlier statement also counted 100 wounded. In turn, it claims its forces have shot down four helicopters and 27 drones, knocked out 33 tanks and four other types of armored fighting vehicles, and inflicted around 200 casualties.
A separate report claims the capture of 11 Azerbaijani vehicles, including a BMP-3.
One gruesome video released by Armenia appears to show three knocked-out BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles and ten deceased Azerbaijani soldiers. Other videos show munitions impacting T-72 tanks, BMP-3 fighting vehicles, BTR-82 APCs and an IMR engineering vehicle.
Two Armenian civilians (a woman and a girl) and an Azerbaijani family of five in the town of Gashalti have been reported killed amidst heavy shelling so far, with another 30 Armenian and 19 Azerbaijani civilians injured.
Azerbaijan’s leader Ilham Aliyev may have initiated the current hostilities in a bid to shore up political support after nationalist protestors briefly seized the parliament building in Baku in July during earlier skirmishes with Armenian troops. Thus, it’s possible the war may not last long if territorial gains allow him to “declare victory and go home.”
International pressure from Europe, the U.S. and especially Russia is ramping up to cease the fighting. However, Turkish political and material support for Azerbaijan may partially countervail such pressure for a time.
Escalation risks remain important however, as Armenia and Azerbaijan possess combat aircraft and long-range missiles and rocket artillery that could strike deep into each other’s territory. A wider conflict could disrupt or damage the lucrative oil industry in Azerbaijan, and heighten already simmering tensions between Turkey and Russia following a year marked by clashes in Syria and Libya.
Most importantly, the humanitarian cost of a wider and/or prolonged conflict could be terrible indeed for both Armenians and Azerbaijanis, which makes diplomatic efforts to head off escalation before the fighting gathers more momentum all the more vital.
Renewed Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict a new threat to Russia’s delicate balancing act with key player Turkey
Russian president Vladimir Putin once complained that communist leader Vladimir Lenin had placed a ‘time bomb’ under Russia. He had in mind the introduction of the federal principle after Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Lenin gave national minorities their own republics within the Soviet Union. In so doing, he created a situation which allowed those republics to secede from the Union once communist power collapsed.
Soviet federalism brought other problems. The communists granted autonomy to the larger nationalities in the form of 15 ‘republics.’ Smaller nationalities also got autonomy, but of a different form – so-called ‘autonomous republics’ and ‘autonomous regions.’ When the union fell apart, fully-fledged republics got independence, but the autonomous republics and regions within them did not.
READ MORE: Baku showcases infantry & artillery in action as Azeri-Armenian border fighting sees opening of second ‘propaganda front’ (VIDEO)
Unsurprisingly, many of the smaller minorities were not too happy with this somewhat arbitrary outcome, and attempted to secede from the seceding republics. The result was several wars, the first of which took place in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, after it attempted to secede from Azerbaijan and join with Armenia. The war ended in an Armenian victory. Not only did the Armenians drive the Azeris out of Nagorno-Karabakh, but they also captured a swath of Azeri territory linking Armenia with the breakaway region.
Nagorno-Karabakh became a de-facto independent state, albeit one recognized by nobody and entirely dependent on Armenian support. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, has never abandoned its claim to its lost province nor to the territories seized by Armenia. The result has been occasional military clashes between Yerevan and Baku over the past 30 years.
This weekend, violence once again flared up on the front lines between the Armenian and Azeri forces. The Armenian government announced that it had repulsed an enemy offensive and issued a video showing the destruction of several items of Azeri military equipment. The Azeri government, in turn, accused Armenia of attacking it, and declared that it had launched its own counter-offensive in which it had ‘liberated’ several villages. Armenia has now mobilized its army. Many fear the outbreak of all-out war.
One explanation for the recent flare-up may be that Azerbaijan feels much stronger than it did when it suffered its defeat at the hands of Armenia 30 years ago. The Azeri economy, benefitting from substantial oil reserves, has outgrown that of its neighbor, as has the Azeri population – there are 10 million Azeris compared with only three million Armenians. Azerbaijan has invested heavily in its military and may feel much more confident about its prospects should matters escalate further.
Another explanation may be the support Azerbaijan is receiving from its primary ally – Turkey. Following this weekend’s clashes, Turkish president Recep Erdogan called on ‘the entire world to stand with Azerbaijan in its battle against invasion.’ Such Turkish support may embolden the Azeri leadership not to back down if things begin to get out of hand.
Russia has officially adopted a position of neutrality in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, and called on all sides to settle their differences peacefully. This has meant supporting the status quo. Since that status quo favours Armenia, in reality this position has meant supporting Armenia, a posture reinforced by Armenia’s membership of various multilateral initiatives sponsored by Russia, notably the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union.
The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh thus indirectly pits Russia against Turkey. It also undermines a common narrative that claims that Russia seeks to undermine democracy and promote authoritarian forms of government. After all, Russia’s ally Armenia is a democracy whereas Turkey’s ally, Azerbaijan, is not.
Nagorno-Karabakh is not the only location where Russian and Turkish proxies are clashing. In Syria, Russia has been backing the government of Bashar Assad while Turkey has been propping up the anti-Assad rebels in Idlib province. And in Libya, Russia is said to support rebel general Khalifa Haftar, while Turkey recently sent substantial aid to the government forces in Tripoli to help drive Haftar’s troops away from the capital.
Russia has good reasons, therefore, to regard Turkey as a spoiler, undermining Russian influence in the Caucasus, Middle East, and North Africa. But Russia isn’t the only state that Turkey has irritated in recent years. Turkey currently has poor relations with fellow NATO members, and this provides an opportunity which Russia can exploit for its own advantage. Economic opportunities also beckon in Turkey, as seen by the recent Turkish decision to purchase Russian-made S-400 air-defense missiles.
Consequently, whenever Russia and Turkey have clashed in recent years, the Russian government has sought to rapidly calm things down. Unsurprisingly, it is now taking the same approach regarding the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the one hand, Russia needs to stand by its Armenian ally. On the other hand, it wishes to avoid an escalation which would bring it into conflict with Turkey. A restoration of the ceasefire and the status-quo ante thus serves it best. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs therefore issued a statement declaring that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was “intensively conducting talks to induce the parties to immediately cease firing and start negotiations to stabilize the situation.”
For now, this approach may work. In the longer term, though, economic and demographic considerations mean that power in the Southern Caucasus will likely continue to shift in Azerbaijan’s favor. As it does, Russia’s balancing act vis-à-vis Turkey could become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Spain Calls for Ceasefire Between Armenia and Azerbaijan
Her comments come after 21 people were killed earlier on Monday during a second day of heavy clashes over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Nathan Allen)
Trump Says U.S. Will Seek to Stop Violence Between Armenia, Azerbaijan
“We’re looking at it very strongly,” the president said in a Sunday evening press briefing. “We have a lot of good relationships in that area. We’ll see if we can stop it.”
The violence left at least 16 military and several civilians dead on Sunday in the heaviest clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 2016, reviving concerns about stability in the South Caucasus, a corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas to world markets.
(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Additional reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Daniel Wallis)