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0 The author is a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe and IWM, Vienna
When the “gendarme of Europe” — as Russia used to be known in the 19th century — gets weaker, the neighbours have reason to celebrate.
But some of the fallout is complicated. The growing weakness of Russia, overstretched by its brutal war in Ukraine, is one reason for the recent escalation in the decades-old conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Since December 12, Azerbaijani activists, sponsored by their government, have been blocking the only road that links Armenia and Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan. That has created a slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe for tens of thousands of Armenian inhabitants, whose only means of procuring food and supplies is cut off.
For Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, this is unfinished business from a short war in 2020. His army comprehensively reconquered territories that Armenian forces had occupied for more than 25 years, but did not fully defeat the Armenians of Karabakh, who began efforts to secede from Azerbaijan back in Soviet times in 1988. Russia was able rapidly to deploy a peacekeeping mission in Karabakh, giving it a new military presence inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s blockade is the latest chapter in a bitter story of violence and mass displacement by both sides over 35 years. Armenians fear that Baku has embarked on a new attempt at the “ethnic cleansing” of Karabakh and its centuries-old Armenian population.
Moscow seems unwilling to order its peacekeepers, their morale and numbers diminished by the Ukraine war, to confront the Azerbaijani protesters and reopen the road. Azerbaijan distrusts the Russians, saying they have conspired to keep the local Armenians armed and transport weapons and landmines through the road to Armenia.
Russia has said almost nothing in public, reinforcing the suspicion that President Vladimir Putin cares more about maintaining leverage over Armenia and Azerbaijan than pursuing a real peace agreement. The inaction of its supposed main ally frustrates Armenia and Nikol Pashinyan, its prime minister. He openly questions the point of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the Russian-led defence pact of which his country is part, and which has failed to come to Armenia’s aid in the past two years.
Across the board Russia’s construction of a “near abroad” sphere of influence is failing. Two other post-Soviet institutions set up by Moscow, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Eurasian Economic Union, are crumbling. A string of post-Soviet countries, seeing signs of the kind of big regional retreat and collapse Russia underwent in 1918 and 1991, are emboldened to settle pieces of local business. In central Asia, a border dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan escalated and claimed dozens of lives. Azerbaijan’s threatening behaviour is part of this picture.
The EU, unaccustomed to a geopolitical role in its eastern neighbourhood, is gingerly making steps into the security breach. It is poised to set up a border monitoring mission in Armenia, after a successful interim experiment. Last year Brussels facilitated negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan on issues left over from the 2020 war.
They went fairly well. Pashinyan and Aliyev held four EU-brokered meetings. For a time, there was a tantalising glimmer of a deal that would bring peace to the south Caucasus and reopen Europe-Asia transport routes that had been shut for decades. The latest crisis has imperilled that process.
The crux of the problem remains that, as in the Balkans in the 1990s, an equitable peace is more attainable if there is a stabilising international security presence. Russia’s peacekeeping mission, small and distrusted though it is, is the only such force in Karabakh. When that mission comes up for renewal in 2025, or perhaps sooner, new conflict is all too likely.
In May last year Charles Michel, the EU’s main mediator, affirmed Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity but said it was “necessary that the rights and security of the ethnic Armenian population in Karabakh be addressed”. That will be a cornerstone of any Armenian-Azerbaijani peace. But who can provide the security? Can the EU, for example, step up to be a security actor either alone or as part of a wider multilateral mission?
Currently it looks implausible. This is a notoriously complex region. Azerbaijan would have to agree. Yet this challenge — and others like it — will not go away, as a security vacuum widens in the region that is the neighbourhood of both the EU and Russia.
