Baku continues to arrest ex-officials of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), which is in the process of formally dissolving itself.

Azerbaijani security services detained three former presidents of the defunct entity during the course of October 3. 

Azerbaijani pro-government media reported that Arayik Harutyunyan, who served as de facto president of the NKR from May 2020 until September 1, had been detained by Azerbaijan's State Security Service (SSS) in Karabakh, and that he was being taken to Baku. 

Earlier the same day, media reported the arrest of the two previous NKR presidents – Bako Saakyan (2007-20) and Arkadi Ghukasyan (1997-2007) – and former chair of parliament David Ishkhanyan by the SSS. The SSS is yet to comment on these four reported arrests. 

The NKR exercised de facto control over Nagorno-Karabakh – an Armenian-majority region internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan –  for more than 30 years. It was disbanded on September 28 by its last president, Samvel Shahramanyan, after Azerbaijan's lightning offensive to retake the territory on September 19-20. 

Harutyunyan was the commander-in-chief of the local armed force, the Artsakh Defense Army, during the 2020 Second Karabakh War which saw Azerbaijan retake most of the territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh that it had lost in the first war in the 1990s. (At the time the Artsakh Defense Force and the army of the Republic of Armenia were largely integrated with each other and fought together against Azerbaijan.)

On October 4, 2020, during the second war, Harutyunyan confirmed that he had ordered a missile strike earlier that day on Azerbaijan's second-largest city, Ganja. He said the missiles targeted military facilities, but dozens of civilians were killed. 

Four separate ballistic missile attacks on the city killed 23 people and wounded nearly 120. Civilians in other cities in western Azerbaijan including Barda, Tartar, Aghdam, Aghjabedi, and Naftalan also were subject to bombardment by Armenian/Karabakhi forces. Human Rights Watch described the attacks on populated areas as "unlawfully indiscriminate."

Several weeks later, Azerbaijan issued an international search warrant for Harutyunyan and other Karabakhi Armenian officials. 

On October 4, Azerbaijani media identified Alov Safaraliyev as Harutyunyan's state-appointed defense lawyer.

Harutyunyan and his two predecessors are not the first former Karabakhi officials to be arrested by Azerbaijan amid the surrender of NKR and mass exodus of Armenians from Karabakh. Ruben Vardanyan, the billionaire and former state minister of NKR, was arrested and placed in 4-month detention awaiting trial on terrorism-related charges. 

David Babayan, former de facto foreign minister, was arrested on September 29 and now faces 25 different charges – mostly related to separatism and terrorism, the Azerbaijani General Prosecutor's Office told media. Babayan was among those declared wanted by Azerbaijan over the Ganja bombings. 

In addition, former NKR Defense Minister Lyova Mnatsakanyan was arrested and accused of torturing Azerbaijanis during the NKR's de facto rule. 

And David Manukyan, a former commander in the Artsakh Defense Army was arrested by the SSS on September 27 and now faces charges of terrorism, creating illegal armed groups, and illegally crossing the border. 

Control over Nagorno-Karabakh sits at the center of a shifting geopolitical landscape and an emerging Cold War 2.0.

NEARLY THE ENTIRE population of 120,000 ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh has been forced to flee their homes after the latest Azerbaijani military assault, according to Armenian authorities and the U.N. This week on Intercepted, Maria Titizian, editor-in-chief of EVN Report, joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain to discuss the history leading up to the recent Azerbaijani offensive and mass exodus of civilians, the collapse of the Republic of Artsakh, and the emerging geopolitical alliances exploiting the protracted humanitarian crisis.

Transcript coming soon.

Listen to the report at https://theintercept.com/2023/10/04/intercepted-nagorno-karabakh-azerbaijan-armenians/

Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.

On September 19, the day Azerbaijan began its offensive in the majority Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Marut Vanyan heard an ominous noise in the sky over his hometown.

“I’m not a military expert,” Vanyan, a journalist, recalled. “But I heard very, very clearly… the roar above me. I’m sure it was a drone.”

Vanyan, a lifelong resident of Stepanakert, once Nagorno-Karabakh’s largest city, recognized the sound from 2020, when Azerbaijan waged a 44-day war for the territory and surrounding regions with the help of Turkish and Israeli weapons.

Vanyan took a video of the sky above Stepanakert, gray and cloudy, the whine of a propeller distinct in the background, and posted it on X.

According to Leonid Nersisyan, a defense analyst and researcher at the Applied Policy Research Institute (APRI) Armenia, an independent think tank, it was the sound of Israel Aerospace Industries’ Harop, a loitering munition known for the piercing noise it produces as it descends on a target.

Azerbaijani forces used the Harop – often referred to as a “suicide drone” – and other Israeli drones throughout the war of 2020. CNN has contacted IAI for comment.

Though their relationship is relatively discreet, Israeli equipment makes up most of Azerbaijan’s arms imports, according to arms researchers. Azerbaijani officials touted Israel’s weapons as integral to their country’s success in Nagorno-Karabakh during the 2020 war.

Now, as over 100,000 ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh in the latest conflict there, Israeli-Azerbaijani ties have come under scrutiny, with an editorial in Israel’s most prominent left-wing newspaper Haaretz proclaiming that the country’s “fingerprints are all over the ethnic cleansing” in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“Drones were used constantly” in the 2020 war, as well as in this latest conflict, a former lieutenant colonel in the Artsakh Defense Army – the Armenian separatist republic’s military force in Karabakh – told CNN on the condition of anonymity. (Artsakh is the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh and the self-proclaimed republic that existed there.)

Azerbaijan “used Harop kamikaze strike drones…Hermes-450 and Orbiter-1K, Orbiter-2, Orbiter-3 reconnaissance drones,” the ex-officer said. All were produced by Israeli arms companies.

Azerbaijan won the 2020 war in a little over a month, regaining much of the territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated and governed, until now, almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians, following the expulsion of ethnic Azeris in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

September’s battle barely took 24 hours, leaving the whole of Karabakh under the control of Azerbaijan after months of blockade. All of the roughly 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the territory have either fled to Armenia or are expected to flee, fearing full-fledged ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities, although Azerbaijan has insisted that it would respect their rights there.

Azerbaijan and Israel are close military partners. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), more than 60% of Azerbaijani weapons imports came from Israel between 2017 and 2020, making up 13% of Israeli exports during the same period. SIPRI research reveals that Azerbaijan purchased a wide variety of drones, missiles, and mortars from Israel between 2010 and 2020.

However, according to SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman, certain specifics are unknown about the extent of the ongoing Azerbaijani-Israeli weapons trade.

“We had quite some information before 2020 and then it stops,” Wezeman said. “And that doesn’t really make sense because in 2020 Azerbaijan used a significant amount of its equipment… Most likely they have continued their relationship with Israel, but that’s about as far as we know.”

The trade is believed to be particularly active in periods just before Azerbaijan has gone to war. A March 2023 investigative report by Haaretz found that flights by an Azerbaijani airline between Baku and Ovda air base, the only airport in Israel through which explosives can be flown, spiked in the months just before Azerbaijan attacked separatist positions in Karabakh in September 2020.

Likewise, Haaretz reported in mid-September that the same company flew between Baku and Ovda less than a week before Azerbaijan began its latest assault in Nagorno-Karabakh. CNN reached out to the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense and the airline in question, but did not receive a response. The Israeli Ministry of Defense, which oversees Ovda Airport, had no comment.

“We don’t know what was on board, but very likely it is something related to the military equipment that Israel already has supplied to Azerbaijan before,” Wezeman said.

The weapons trade between Israel and Azerbaijan mirrors their diplomatic relationship, once described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as “like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it… below the surface.” Despite decades of bilateral cooperation, Azerbaijan only opened an embassy in Israel this year.

But their ties go beyond guns and ammunition: OEC figures show that Israel bought 65% of its crude oil from Azerbaijan in 2021. The countries are also believed to share intelligence on Iran, Israel’s archenemy, with which Azerbaijan shares a border and which has a substantial ethnic Azeri population that constitutes the country’s largest minority. Azerbaijan has also reportedly allowed the Israeli spy agency Mossad to use it as a hub to spy on Iran. (The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the matter.)

According to Efraim Inbar, an expert on Israel-Azerbaijan relations and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, ties between the two have grown stronger since 2020.

“Oil and arms sales continue. Azerbaijan feels greater pressure from Iran whose international position is improving,” Inbar told CNN in an email. “There is no great sympathy (in Israel) for Armenia that is seen as an Iranian ally.”

In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post, Armenia’s ambassador to Israel said Israeli weapons are being fired at “peaceful civilians” despite Israeli civil society being “very pro-Armenia in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh and recognition of the Armenian genocide.” (Israel’s government does not recognize the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I as genocide, fearing damage to its relationship with Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.)

But there is little political opposition in the country to selling arms to Azerbaijan, Inbar said.

“Arms sales do not receive much publicity,” he added. “The contribution of Israeli drones to Azerbaijan’s war is well known, however. Israelis are proud of their weaponry. Arms sales are considered good for Israel.”

Yet despite their high visibility in Karabakh, the role of drones should not overshadow that of other Israeli weapons, according to Nersisyan, the defense analyst at APRI Armenia.

“People consider them to be some kind of a super weapon,” he said. “Of course, they are very important, but there are roles of other types of weapons.”

Among those are Israel’s LORA missiles, which Azerbaijan first purchased from Israel in 2017 according to SIPRI.

In October 2020, Azerbaijan repeatedly struck the area near an electrical substation in Stepanakert using Israeli-made weapons. The former lieutenant colonel in the Artsakh Defense Army told CNN he witnessed one of these attacks personally. The diameter and depth of the crater there showed that the Azerbaijani military had used a LORA missile, he said, adding that it hit a residential building.

The question remains as to how far Israel is willing to go in supporting Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia. An ongoing border crisis between the two countries has resulted in Azerbaijani incursions into Armenian territory, and Azerbaijani troops currently occupy land well within Armenia’s borders in its southern Syunik province. Many in Armenia worry that an emboldened Azerbaijan will attempt to invade their country, which Azerbaijan denies. Some fears center around Nakhchivan, a landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan that borders Turkey and Armenia, and Baku’s desire for a transport corridor linking it with the rest of the country.

“Azerbaijan doesn’t have any military goals or objectives on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia,” Hikmet Ajiyev, the foreign policy advisor to Ilham Aliyev, told Reuters on October 1.

The World Jewish Center in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, was vandalized on Tuesday night in an act thought to be directly related to Israel’s growing relations with neighboring adversary Azerbaijan.

The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan, historically inhabited by ethnic Armenian Christians, has been at the center of a longstanding conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The improved relations between Israel and Azerbaijan prompted supporters of the Armenian separatist government in Nagorno-Karabakh to target the Jewish center in Yerevan.

The attackers issued a statement saying: “The Jews are the enemies of the Armenian nation, complicit in Turkish crimes and the regime of [Azerbaijan President Ilhan] Aliyev. The Jewish state provides weapons to Aliyev’s criminal regime, and Jews from America and Europe actively support him. Turkey, Aliyev’s regime, and the Jews are the sworn enemies of the Armenian state and people.”

They added: “If Jewish rabbis in the United States and Europe continue to support Aliyev’s regime, we will continue to burn their synagogues in other countries. Every rabbi will be a target for us. No Israeli Jew will feel safe in these countries.”

The center in Yerevan was damaged, but not by fire, according to reports.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), responded that “the vandalism of the World Jewish Center in Armenia is distressing. The Jewish community in Armenia is not a party to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

He urged Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan to condemn the act and called for increased security measures for the Jewish community. Goldschmidt expressed his solidarity with the Jewish community in Armenia and hoped they could peacefully observe the holiday of Sukkot.

According to World Jewish Congress estimates, Armenia is home to about 500-1,000 Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi origin, and some Mizrahi and Georgian Jews, localized in Yerevan.

An ethnically diverse country, Armenia has had a deep historical connection to Judaism. Today, the small Armenian Jewish community is able to practice freely but there have been several manifestations of antisemitism.

Russia exchanged views with the United States and the European Union on the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh ahead of the lightning military operation by Azerbaijan last month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Politico earlier reported that top officials from the US and the EU met their Russian counterparts in Turkey for emergency talks about Karabakh days before Azerbaijan launched its operation in the breakaway region.

“The US and EU approached us and asked us to hold a meeting,” Zakharova told reporters. She said the sides exchanged views about the situation in Karabakh.

“There was nothing secret about this meeting; it was an ordinary exchange of views. We shall see how the West will present all this now,” she said.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-761659

On Wednesday, Greek Foreign Affairs Minister George Gerapetritis spoke with his Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan, and discussed the refugee situation following Azerbaijana's military seizure of historically and indigenously Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Greek foreign minister conveyed his country’s concern over the mass exodus of Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh and strong solidarity with the Armenian people, the ministry posted on X.

Moreover, the Greek minister reaffirmed that Greece "stands with Armenia and is prepared to provide humanitarian aid alongside the EU."

Gerapetritis also pledged to "support Armenia in international fora in order to raise awareness about the urgent need for a solution to the issue, and expressed Greece's readiness to assist Armenian refugees," added the ministry.

Meanwhile, senior Russian, United States and European Union diplomats met in secret on the eve of Azerbaijan’s lightning campaign to retake the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Kremlin confirmed Wednesday.

Amberin Zaman

The convoys snaked for miles along mountain passes as the mass exodus of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority Armenian enclave that is formally part of Azerbaijan, continued to unfold. Western leaders wrung their hands but did nothing to stop it. With the few belongings they could retrieve — mattresses, refrigerators, pots and pans — piled precariously on their battered Soviet-era cars, over 100,000 people, almost triple the population of Lichtenstein, fled the contested region where Armenians dwelled for millennia until Azerbaijan first starved them under a nine-month-long blockade then attacked them on Sept. 19 in what it called an “anti-terror operation.”

The effective ethnic cleansing of an entire population in less than two weeks marked one of the largest civilian displacements in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a geopolitical shift of seismic proportions that empowers Turkey, weakens Iran and puts Armenia’s fledgling democracy at risk. For most Armenians, it was — as Armenian political analyst Tigran Grigoryan put it — “the greatest catastrophe to befall our people since the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915.” Yet the story has already vanished from international headlines.

By Sunday, when Western media and aid organizations were finally allowed into Stepanakert, the region's capital, practically all of Nagorno-Karabakh’s estimated 120,000 Armenians had left. The clutch of the elderly and disabled who remained acknowledged they had not been “forced” to leave by Azerbaijani authorities.

On paper, it is true. Azerbaijan did not order any Armenians to leave. Lest there be any doubt, Baku’s well-oiled propaganda machine flooded social media with pictures of Azerbaijani forces handing chocolates to the very same children it deprived of the most basic foodstuffs for months as they crossed into Armenia. Yet it ensured that life was so miserable that few would opt to stay. Indeed, even as Azerbaijani authorities rebuffed claims of ethnic cleansing, insisting their forces had struck “legitimate military targets,” eyewitness accounts of rape and indiscriminate shelling that wounded and killed children began to emerge.

“There are grounds to believe that war crimes occurred in four villages — Taghavard, Haterk, Vardadzor and Kyulagagh — on the first day of the assault,” said Eric Hacopian, who is affiliated with the Civilitas Foundation, an independent nonprofit based in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. “But survivors are too scared to talk,” Hacopian told Al-Monitor. The International Committee of the Red Cross has begun investigating reports that hundreds of civilians, many of them children, remain missing.

Azerbaijan showed few signs of contrition as it named a street in Stepanakert on Tuesday after Enver Pasha, the Young Turk leader who is seen as one of the main architects of the Armenian genocide.

An 83-year-old refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh who spent three days on the road to flee advancing Azerbaijani forces, in Goris, Armenia Sept. 29. (Al-Monitor/Amberin Zaman)

Outside a government registration center for refugees in Goris, a mountain valley close to the Lachin corridor linking Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, a sea of men, women and children clutched their belongings, looking exhausted and dazed. An old woman lay slumped in a rickety wheelchair.

Teenage volunteers pressed water bottles into the refugees' hands while others handed out used clothing. Inside a tent pitched by the UN’s World Food Program, refugees wolfed down bowls of chicken soup. “Join us for the next course: borsch,” said Movses Poghosyan, director of the local charity House of Hope, his voice seesawing between hilarity and grief. 

“We were hiding in the basement without food and water for three days. The shelling was so loud. We were terrified; the children cried nonstop,” said Vera Antonyan, a mother of four, as she cradled her 7-month-old daughter Gabriella, who was born during the blockade. The family had just arrived from Stepanakert after a 14-hour drive. “For months I could not find food for my baby, and now this,” Antonyan lamented, as her mother-in-law, Marine Karapetyan, who worked as a cleaning lady in a children’s hospital, broke down in tears.

Nineteen-year-old Maria Arakelyan — an aspiring dressmaker from the village of Karmishuka who appeared so malnourished that she looked 12 — tried to put a brave face on her plight. “We will return,” she said, gesturing to her three siblings. Her father, Artyom, who grew vegetables for a living, angrily interjected. “I left my boy’s grave there,” he said of his son who had died fighting in the previous war in 2020 in which Azerbaijan wrested back territories occupied by Armenia in the early 1990s together with parts of Nagorno-Karabakh. “It’s all Pashinyan’s fault. Next, he will give them Yerevan.”

Maria Arakelyan, a 19-year-old refugee, stands outside a registration center in Goris, Sept. 29, 2023. (Al-Monitor/Amberin Zaman)

Armenian roulette

Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister and a former journalist, led the mass protests in 2018 that dislodged the latest Kremlin-backed kleptocrat, Serzh Sargsyan, who had kept the country mired in poverty and repression. Armenia’s first retail politician has since been waging war against the old elites and modernizing the country with shiny new roads and hospitals. Per capita income doubled as IT startups boomed. Yerevan, once a gloomy post-Soviet backwater, brims with life. A crimson Ferrari crawled along Pushkin Avenue on a recent evening as designer-clad Armenians sipped cocktails in posh sidewalk cafes. The capital is ringed with new high rises boasting views of Mount Ararat across the border in Turkey. The influx of young Russian professionals following the invasion of Ukraine has given the economy a further boost.

Pashinyan was so popular that he was reelected in 2021 despite Armenia’s crushing defeat by Azerbaijan in the 44-day-long war the year prior. Over 3,800 Armenian soldiers died, an unbearably high toll for a country of 2.9 million with a declining birthrate.

Pashinyan’s efforts to move Armenia away from Russia to the West raised hopes that the country would grow irrevocably prosperous and democratic. For Pashinyan, this involved several risky moves. Under a peace deal brokered by Russia in November 2020, Armenia formally renounced all claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. It demanded, however, that the ethnic rights of its majority Armenians who ran a de facto state there called Artsakh for the past 30 years be guaranteed.

Azerbaijan has rejected Nagorno-Karabakh's demands for autonomy and, with no Armenians left, the point is now moot.

Pashinyan also reached out to Armenia’s historic tormentor, Turkey, whose killer drones and military advisers clinched Baku’s 2020 victory and whose Ottoman forebears murdered over a million Armenians in what is acknowledged by numerous countries, including the United States, as genocide. The “normalization process” was meant to result in the establishment of diplomatic relations with Ankara and the reopening of land borders sealed by Turkey during the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, during which Armenia and Azerbaijan committed war crimes and acts of ethnic and cultural erasure. However, a vanquished Azerbaijan “undoubtedly came off worse,” according to Thomas de Waal, the author of "Black Garden," a historical account of that conflict.

Vera Antonyan, seen with her mother-in-law Marine Karapetyan, says she struggled to feed her baby during Azerbaijan’s blockade, Goris, Sept. 29, 2023. (Al-Monitor/Amberin Zaman)

Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine further emboldened Pashinyan. He has deepened security ties with the United States. Armenia held joint military exercises with US forces even as fighting erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh. “There is a lot more going on behind the scenes,” said a senior Armenian official speaking anonymously to Al-Monitor. The official declined to elaborate.

Since November, in a further bid to sideline Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted three rounds of peace talks with the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan while cheering on Ankara’s engagement with Yerevan.

In May, Pashinyan hinted that he might pull out of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Russia’s version of NATO. In early September, his wife, Anna, traveled to Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid for the first time since the war began. Photos of her posing with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his spouse, Olena, will not have amused Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In a further escalation, Armenia’s parliament voted Tuesday to join the International Criminal Court, a move described by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as “extremely hostile.” Countries that have signed and ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC are bound to arrest Putin, who was indicted for war crimes in Ukraine if he sets foot on their soil.

The same day, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said Paris had agreed to a deal to supply French hardware to the Armenian military.

Can Pashinyan’s gamble pay off?

Red lines breached

During a Sept. 14 hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Yuri Kim suggested it had. She noted that Blinken’s “leadership has yielded results” and that Armenia and Azerbaijan had made “progress on a peace agreement that could stabilize the region.” Kim warned, however, that the United States “will not countenance any action or effort — short term or long term — to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. … We have also made it abundantly clear that the use of force is not acceptable. We give this committee our assurance that these principles will continue to guide our efforts in this region.” Five days later, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kim and Samantha Power, the USAID administrator and author of a book pressing for recognition of the Armenian genocide, rushed to Yerevan the following day. The largely symbolic visit did nothing to change the facts on the ground. On Sept. 26, the leaders of the Republic of Artsakh formally surrendered, ending their decades-long quest for independence as Armenians continued to pour out of the enclave.

EU leaders have since aired anger at Azerbaijan’s “betrayal.” Yet Azerbaijan has not faced any sanctions and there are few signs that it will. The Europeans have grown more dependent on the energy-rich state since the war on Ukraine led to sanctions on Russian oil and gas sales. In 2022, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Baku where she hailed Azerbaijan as a “trustworthy partner” and struck a deal to double EU imports of Azerbaijani gas by 2027.  On Tuesday, European Council President Charles Michel said he was “disappointed” with Azerbaijan and that it needed to show “goodwill” and respect international law to “protect the entire population of Azerbaijan, including the Armenian population,” never mind that there are virtually no Armenians left inside Azerbaijani territory.  Still, Azerbaijan remained "a partner," he intoned.

Volunteers distribute used clothes to refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh, Goris, Armenia, Sept. 29, 2023. (Al-Monitor/Amberin Zaman)

The framing of the Nagorno-Karabakh tragedy as a humanitarian crisis is already in full swing. “Western governments will send aid to clear their consciences and go back to business as usual,” the senior Armenian official observed.

Bye Bye, Russia?

Cynics might argue that it’s all for the best. Now that the Nagorno-Karabakh issue has been “resolved,” there is no longer a need for an estimated 2,000 Russian peacekeepers deployed in the enclave under the 2020 cease-fire accord.

“Destroying the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic eliminates the main obstacle to Armenian-Azerbaijani peace and allows Armenia to tell the Russians to go,” said Benjamin Poghosyan, who heads the Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies in Yerevan. The same applies to peace between Turkey and Armenia. Russian border forces stationed along the border to defend Armenia would no longer be necessary. “From the US perspective, this is a win-win,” Poghosyan told Al-Monitor.

Many Armenians might welcome a Russian withdrawal amid widespread fury over the Kremlin’s perceived support for Azerbaijan and Putin’s cozy ties with its strongman, Ilham Aliyev. In the 2020 conflict, Russia sat on its hands as Azerbaijani forces clobbered their Armenian foes. In the latest round, its peacekeepers stood by as Azerbaijani forces overran Nagorno-Karabakh. “Russia is responsible from the very beginning. Russia proved it is not a trustworthy partner,” said a man who would only identify himself as “Styopa” and sells paintings at Yerevan’s open-air market known as the Vernissage.

The immediate cause for Russia’s pro-Baku tilt is Ukraine. Azerbaijan, a far bigger and richer country, has not joined in Western sanctions and, unlike Armenia, has displayed no sympathy for Ukraine. But the overarching reason is Putin’s fear of democracy in Russia’s erstwhile empire.

“All of these events are directly related to Russia’s attempt to overthrow Pashinyan and stop his Western pivot,” said Hacopian. He argues it failed. “Everybody blames the Russians. Armenia is now the most pro-American state in the region. Russia’s moves backfired.”

Olesya Vartanyan, senior South Caucasus analyst at the International Crisis Group, concurred. “Nagorno-Karabakh is at the center of Armenian identity, and the Russians allowed it to collapse. They lost Armenian society,” Vartanyan told Al-Monitor.

This marks a sea change. Armenia was among the most pro-Russian of the former Soviet states. According to a contested version of history, imperial Russia opened its doors to tens of thousands of Armenians fleeing the genocide. More than half of Armenia’s current population is thought to be their descendants.

Western observers contend that anti-Russian sentiments are currently so high that Pashinyan is off the hook. However, interviews with multiple Armenians across the country suggest otherwise. “He gave away everything,” said Markar Martirosyan, who runs a pet shop in Yerevan. “Pashinyan is zibil,” Martirosyan added, using the Armenian slang for animal poop or garbage, which is the same in Turkish.

“Turkey’s man”

It hasn’t helped that talks with Turkey have led nowhere. The land border remains shut and diplomatic relations have not been established. None of this stopped Pashinyan from joining Turkish President Recep Tayyip  Erdogan’s inaugural bash in Ankara following his electoral victory in May.

Pro-government Turkish hacks mockingly refer to him as "our man."

“Pashinyan is very naive,” said political analyst Grigoryan. “He made unilateral concessions without getting anything in return. He is a gift to Aliyev, to Erdogan.” Pashinyan reckoned that detente with Turkey would deter Azerbaijan from further assaults. “It’s hard to speak of a peace dividend when your country is flooded with refugees,” Grigoryan noted.

Hakob Baboudjian says he will dislodge Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan using “psychology and quantum physics,” Yerevan’s Republic Square, Sept. 30, 2023. (Al-Monitor/Amberin Zaman)

The notion that Armenia could decouple so easily from Russia is every bit as naive. For starters, 40% of Armenia’s exports go to Russia. Russian state enterprises control 90% of Armenia’s power-generating capacity.

Many in the Armenian diaspora — notably hard-liners in the influential Armenian Revolutionary Federation who advocate friendship with Russia — agree. They label Pashinyan “Turk” and claim he will make Armenia a Turkish vassal.

The setbacks are taking a toll. In mayoral elections held on Sept. 17, Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party saw its popularity slip amid growing apathy with only 28.5% of eligible voters casting their ballots. Yet it still trounced its rivals. This is because the majority of Armenians still regard him as the lesser evil.

Opposition demonstrations that erupted in the days following Azerbaijan’s attack have fizzled out. Putative rival Hakob Baboudjian, who staged an anti-government protest Saturday in Yerevan’s iconic Republic Square, said he would “deploy deep psychology and quantum physics” to unseat Pashinyan. “I will make the nation happy. I will heal the population,” he told Al-Monitor as a small band of followers looked on.

Still, it would be unwise of Pashinyan to lapse into complacency. Feeding and accommodating over 100,000 people — many of them subsistence farmers with few skills — will pose a huge challenge. The initial solidarity felt by Armenians for their ethnic kin may shift to resentment. Many accuse the so-called Karabakh clan, which held power prior to Pashinyan, of holding Armenia hostage to their own narrow interests, rejecting any concessions that might have resulted in peace with Azerbaijan and Turkey. “They created an emergence of a segment of society that associates Nagorno-Karabakh with criminality,” said Hacopian.

Coups and land grabs

More immediately though, what if Azerbaijan decides to attack again? EU-meditated peace talks between Pashinyan and Aliyev are set to resume in the Spanish city of Granada on Thursday. “Should the peace talks collapse, this will increase the risk of further escalation. One day we can wake up to see another military operation and another change of landscape in the region,” said the Crisis Group’s Vartanyan.

Baku wants to connect Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani exclave that borders Turkey. Aliyev insists that Azerbaijan should be granted unfettered access through a proposed land corridor and not be subjected to border controls. Armenia ripostes that not only would this constitute a breach of its sovereignty, but it would effectively cut it off from its southern neighbor and closest regional ally, Iran.

Turkey favors the scheme because this would allow it direct access to Azerbaijan proper and to Russian and Central Asian markets that lie beyond. Russia is also on board provided that its own forces monitor the corridor.

Armenia’s real and not unreasonable worry is that Baku will use the corridor as a launching pad to invade Syunik, the southern region that separates Nakhichevan from Azerbaijan. Israel would be delighted. It uses Azerbaijan soil to spy on Iran. In exchange, Israel provided weapons in the last two Nagorno-Karabakh wars. Iran has declared any such move cause for war.

In an ominous portent, Azerbaijan has occupied an estimated 125 square kilometers of Armenian territory since 2020. Western inertia in the face of the past week’s events may embolden Aliyev to make another land grab, sowing the seeds of yet another cycle of bloodletting. This would be all the more likely should Russia succeed in ousting Pashinyan and install its own apparatchiks, most likely in a coup. The Kremlin could revert to its old tactic of playing one side against the other.

Would the United States or the Europeans intervene? "They did nothing when [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi seized power in Egypt. Why would they act for a small and less important country like Armenia?" asked Firdevs Robinson, former Caucasus and Central Asia editor for the BBC.

“The man in the street would think ‘hard power decides everything. Human rights is bullshit,’” said analyst Poghosyan. “This view is shared by everyone in Armenia.”

Back in Goris, geopolitics are far from the refugees' minds. “What hurt me the most was to see the cemetery where all our soldiers are buried,” said Karapetyan, the cleaning lady. “The knowledge that we won’t ever see them again, the knowledge that they died in vain is impossible to bear.”

Correction: Oct, 4. An Earlier version of this article stated that "over 100,000 people, which is more than the population of the European states of Malta, Luxembourg and Lichtenstein combined" had fled Nagorno-Karabakh. The combined population of these states currently stands at 1,229,416. 

Top officials from the United States and the EU met with their Russian counterparts for undisclosed emergency talks in Turkey designed to resolve the standoff over Nagorno-Karabakh, just days before Azerbaijan launched a military offensive last month to seize the breakaway territory from ethnic Armenian control.

The off-diary meeting marks a rare — if ultimately unsuccessful — contact between Moscow and the West on a major security concern, after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 upended regular diplomacy.

A senior diplomat with knowledge of the discussions told POLITICO the meeting took place on September 17 in Istanbul as part of efforts to pressure Azerbaijan to end its nine-month blockade of the enclave and allow in humanitarian aid convoys from Armenia. According to the envoy, the meeting focused on “how to get the bloody trucks moving” and ensure supplies of food and fuel could reach its estimated 100,000 residents.

The U.S. was represented by Louis Bono, Washington’s senior adviser for Caucasus negotiations, while the EU dispatched Toivo Klaar, its representative for the region. Russia, meanwhile, sent Igor Khovaev, who serves as Putin’s special envoy on relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Such high-level diplomatic interaction is rare. In March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came face to face on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India — but Moscow insisted the exchange happened “on the move” and no negotiations were held.

In a statement provided to POLITICO, an EU official said “we believe it is important to maintain channels of communications with relevant interlocutors to avoid misunderstandings.” The official also observed Klaar had sought to keep lines open on numerous fronts over the “past years,” including in talks with Khovaev and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department declined to comment on the meeting, saying only that “we do not comment on private diplomatic discussions.”

However, a U.S. official familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters explained the discussions came out of an understanding that the Kremlin still holds sway in the region. “We need to be able to work with the Russians on this because they do have influence over the parties, especially as we’re at a precarious moment right now,” the American official said.

Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh on September 19, sending tanks and troops into the region under the cover of heavy artillery bombardment. Karabakh Armenian leaders were forced to surrender following 24 hours of fierce fighting that killed hundreds on both sides. Since then, the Armenian government says more than 100,000 people have fled their homes and crossed the border, fearing for their lives.

Azerbaijan insists it has the right to take action against “illegal armed formations” on its internationally recognized territory, and has pledged to “reintegrate” those who have stayed behind. European Council President Charles Michel described the military operation as “devastating,” while Blinken has joined calls for Azerbaijan “to refrain from further hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh and provide unhindered humanitarian access.”

An Israeli medical delegation flew early on Wednesday to Nagorno-Karabakh to help victims of an explosion last week at a fuel depot that has killed at least 20 people and injured hundreds more. The cause of the explosion was not made public.

The medical delegation led by Prof. Ofer Merin, director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center and a leading cardiothoracic surgeon, was sent on behalf of the Health Ministry to provide medical treatment to the hundreds of injured citizens, including many burn victims.

The decision to send the group was made after the Armenian Health Ministry in Yerevan and the World Health Organization asked Israel for assistance and the Foreign Ministry approved it.

The delegation includes 14 participants, including plastic surgeons, anesthesiologists, intensive-care doctors, and nurses who specialize in treating burns. The delegation brought with it advanced equipment for the treatment of burns and began its work at two local medical centers.

According to the Armenian government, nearly 30,000 refugees have crossed into the country since local forces surrendered to Azerbaijan. About 120,000 ethnic Armenians live in the region.

France has agreed to deliver military equipment to Armenia, following Azerbaijan’s recapture of the Nagorno-Karabakh region last month.

During a visit to Armenia yesterday, French Foreign Minister, Catherine Colonna, met with her Armenian counterpart, Ararat Mirzoyan, and Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, in what was the first official visit to the country by a Western official since Azerbaijan’s victory in Nagorno-Karabakh and the exodus of at least a hundred thousand Armenians from the area last week.

Speaking to reporters at press conference in the capital, Yerevan, after talks, Colonna announced that “France has given its agreement to the conclusion of future contracts with Armenia which will allow the delivery of military equipment to Armenia so that it can ensure its defence.”

READ: Turkey slams France’s call for Nagorno-Karabakh independence

Declining to provide any details regarding such military deliveries, she simply said that “there are things that were already agreed between Armenia and France and that are in progress”. Despite the increase in military cooperation and the newly-announced supplies of military equipment, Colonna added that neither Yerevan nor Paris seek an escalation in the region.

The French Foreign Minister also revealed that she had requested the EU’s top diplomat and Foreign Policy chief, Josep Borrell, to expand the bloc’s observation mission in Armenia and to include the country in the European Peace Facility (EPF), the funding mechanism aiming to enhance the EU’s ability to prevent conflicts, build peace and strengthen international security.

Examples of the EPF at work include the EU’s acceptance of Moldova, Georgia, North Macedonia and the African Union (AU) into that initiative since 2021. The addition of Armenia would provide the Armenian military with funding and support from the bloc, strengthening guarantees of security for Yerevan against players which allegedly pose a threat, such as Baku.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231004-france-to-deliver-military-equipment-to-armenia-calls-for-eu-to-guarantee-security/