Russia failed on all three counts.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has warned that the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, roughly 120,000 people, will leave and he accused Azerbaijan of “ethnic cleansing.” Azerbaijan has insisted that residents can stay, but those fleeing say they do not trust Baku after decades of war.
By late Friday 93,000 Karabakh Armenians had arrived in Armenia, according to Pashinyan’s office, more than 77 percent of the region’s estimated population.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has insisted that Russia does not bear blame, and said that there was “no direct reason,” for the exodus, merely that “people are willing to leave.” His statement ignored repeated cycles of war and ethnic violence in the region.
“It is hardly possible to talk about who is to blame,” Peskov insisted Thursday amid mounting criticism of Russia. He described Baku’s swift moves to reimpose control over Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally-recognized as Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory, as “a new system of coordinates.” He said residents should get to know the agreements on living under Azerbaijani rule.
Many analysts ascribe the Russian failure down to the Kremlin being highly distracted by its war in Ukraine. The focus on the war has undermined Russia’s authority and influence throughout its geopolitical neighborhood, including the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Moscow’s sway was also diminished when Turkey, Azerbaijan’s powerful military backer, emerged as the victorious regional power broker in the 2020 war that Baku used to seize back most of Nagorno-Karabakh and other Azerbaijani territory taken by Armenia in the first Karabakh war, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But other analysts and officials see darker motives: Moscow’s betrayal of Armenia, for which it had long provided security guarantees, in a conscious shift to accommodate Azerbaijan and Turkey. Some believe Putin was seeking to punish Pashinyan over his search for new Western partners, as Yerevan seeks to reduce its decades-long dependence on Russia.
Pashinyan’s supporters fear Moscow may use the largely pro-Kremlin opposition in Armenia to stage protests in a bid to oust the prime minister and drag Yerevan back into Moscow’s fold.
When Armenia won control of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were forced flee. Decades of war ensued.
But in 2020, heavily armed with advanced weapons from Israel and Turkey purchased using oil and gas riches, Azerbaijan attacked its smaller landlocked neighbor in 2020, defeating Armenia.
The Russia-brokered truce allowed Russians to deploy peacekeepers and border guards and maintain at least the appearance of a role as a regional power broker. But it left uncertain the fate of the breakaway Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, its capital Stepanakert and its Armenian residents.
Putin has devoted great energy trying to re-create Russia’s lost empire and dominate its ex-Soviet neighbors, so the failure to protect Armenia, a longtime ally, was a striking shift. For other small nations on Russia’s borders, the message was clear: Who could trust Russia in the future?
“I think it’s a process of managed decline,” said Laurence Broers, an expert on the Caucasus at Chatham House, a London-based policy institute.
Broers said that Russia had quietly turned away from Armenia toward the powerful regional nexus of Turkey and Azerbaijan, because of Turkey’s importance in Russia’s war against Ukraine and in regional energy and transportation routes in the South Caucasus.
“I see it as a pivot to Azerbaijan and becoming a partner in Azerbaijani-Turkish connectivity,” he said.
Olesya Vartanyan, an analyst with International Crisis Group, said a study of Russia’s peacekeeping mission showed that it grew less effective after the invasion of Ukraine, as Azerbaijan steadily withdrew cooperation.
Russian peacekeepers patrolled tense areas but “no matter how often they traveled, and how often they patrolled the areas, that did not have any impact,” Vartanyan…
Read More: Russia failed to keep peace in Nagorno-Karabakh, in pivot away from Armenia