Page 72 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine December 2023

72 Opinion
bne December 2023
If Azerbaijan continues to boycott Western formats, the
West can strengthen Armenia's defence capabilities, forcing Aliyev to forget about the new war and return to constructive negotiations. Azerbaijan could even be forced to accept back the 150,000 Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh under the international mandate of the United Nations.
Aliyev's next step will be decided by Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin, who held a meeting in Sochi 15 days before Azerbaijan's September 19 attack on Karabakh.
It is still the case that Azerbaijan may not sign a peace treaty with Armenia and could prefer the logic of the "Cold War".
COMMENT
There is a possibility that Azerbaijan will wait until a suitable window for new military aggression is created. Elections are coming soon in the US and the EU.
But if the US and the EU increase the pressure against Azerbaijan now, a new date for the meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan could be announced in the near future under the Western format."
Robert Ananyan is a journalist based in Yerevan, Armenia, who focuses on the political, and security problems of the South Caucasus.
US, Europe, and Russia jostle for influence in the South Caucasus
Zachary Weiss in Tbilisi
More than a month after Azerbaijan attacked ethnic Armenians living in its Nagorno-Karabakh region, displacing 120,000 people, foreign political influence in the Caucasus is still shifting. In the recent conflict, the United States played a role for Armenia in ways it had not done in years past, while Russia’s leadership is still attempting to limit the damage from its failure in mediating the conflict.
Evolving Russian interests made Moscow unable and unwilling to prevent the conflict or help Armenia as it had previously. Russia’s ties with Armenia have loosened, partially because it is distracted by the ongoing war in Ukraine.
As the West is beginning to fill Russia’s old supportive role in Armenia in its own way, the most powerful foreign players in the Caucasus have changed their relations with regional actors, undoing 30 years of precedent.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia supported Armenia in its territorial dispute and wars with Azerbaijan, and key Western states stayed largely uninvolved, though some aided Azerbaijan. According to Krzysztof Strachota, department head for Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw, Russia’s weakening influence is changing power dynamics in the Caucasus, but Russia is not abandoning the Caucasus entirely.
“The last war is one more major step in the erosion of the regional order, the post-Soviet order, the order donated by Russia. Right now, the Russian influence, Russian instruments,
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and Russian politics are much weaker than they were two months ago, two years ago or 10 years ago,” he says.
Changing Russian influence could mean that the West
can form new relations with regional actors, according
to Strachota. “A weak Russia doesn’t mean that Russia is powerless. From the Western perspective, weakening the post-Soviet system, weakening the Russian donation, creates more space for the states in the region. It creates more space for the West and the Caucasus’ relations.”
Expelled Azerbaijanis make a return visit to Nagorno-Karabakh.