Azerbaijan has won Nagorno-Karabakh, but a bigger test is just starting

Fighters in the predominantly ethnic-Armenian region within Azerbaijan agreed to lay down their arms.

It was hard to imagine any of Russia’s neighbors deciding this was a good time to start a war, given the bloody spectacle of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Yet Azerbaijan did exactly that on Tuesday,
launching a “local anti-terrorist operation’’ against the separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. And it may already have won.

Fighters in the predominantly ethnic-Armenian region within Azerbaijan in essence surrendered on Wednesday, agreeing to lay down their arms in a deal that was  brokered by Russian peacekeepers. Handled right, this could be positive, ending more than three decades of often bloody conflict. But given the dispute’s brutal history, that will demand uncommon self-restraint on the part of the Azeris.

The struggle over Karabakh has been underway on and off since before the 1991 collapse of the former Soviet Union. There have been two wars, near constant skirmishes, tens of thousands of deaths and bouts of ethnic cleansing by both sides.

With Putin both preoccupied in Ukraine and hostile to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and the West struggling to cope with another ex-Soviet conflict, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev saw an opportunity to seize victory.

This could have been achieved through diplomacy. Pashinyan already did the politically impossible when he publicly agreed earlier this year to recognise Azerbaijan’s legal sovereignty over the enclave to secure a settlement acceptable to the country’s capital Baku. Two sets of talks, one mediated by the US and European Union, the other by Russia, were on offer. An agreement that gave Baku lasting control of its internationally recognised territory, together with protections for ethnic-Armenians and returning Azeris, was within reach.

For a long time, it was Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenians, backed by the Armenian government in Yerevan and its Russian allies, who were ascendent. Not only did they drive Azeris and the Azeri armed forces from the enclave, in 1993 they also seized seven Azeri districts around it, mining the land and emptying villages. There were some wise voices in Yerevan back then who called for cutting a deal with Azerbaijan to secure Karabakh’s autonomy while the Armenian side had a strong hand to play. Yet their advice was drowned out in favor of more ambitious goals, such as independence.

Since then, a gas- and oil-fueled boom in Azerbaijan has boosted economic growth, funding a rearmament campaign. Armenia was unable to keep up. After a popular revolt brought Pashinyan to power in 2018, to Putin’s displeasure, Armenia’s Russian security umbrella began to look leaky. Baku struck two years later, recapturing the seven lost provinces and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Now Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s long-serving authoritarian leader has taken a hard line, demanding that the enclave’s
local government dissolve itself and its forces disarm, with no mention of autonomy.

Russia called for calm and mediated, but it may also have played a role. It has had peacekeepers on the ground since the 2020 fighting, but they have done little to prevent Azerbaijan’s blockade of the narrow Lachin corridor that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Food, medicines and arms supplies have slowed to a trickle since the start of the year, degrading defenses.

Pashinyan has complained that Armenia can no longer rely on Russia to protect it. He has also been building ties with the EU and this year snubbed Putin’s answer to NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Earlier this month, after Pashinyan’s wife took humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Moscow called Armenia’s ambassador in for a talking to.

“There is clearly a breakdown in Russian-Armenian relations on many fronts,’’ said Thomas de Waal, senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Carnegie Europe, who has been writing on the Caucasus for more than 30 years. “There is fear in Armenia that Russia wants regime change and may be using events in Nagorno-Karabakh to achieve it.’’

In reality, the West had limited leverage. Although the EU accounted for 52% of Azerbaijan’s trade last year, that was the result of a huge spike in exports of natural gas and crude oil, as Europe sought alternatives to sanctioned Russian supplies. Cutting off imports of Azeri energy would always have been unappealing and probably is now moot in the wake of Aliyev’s quick win.

Yet this is just the start. The cease-fire must first hold and agreement must be reached  in talks that are set to begin Thursday, giving some guarantee of  safety to Karabakh’s ethnic-Armenians. The risk otherwise is of yet another round of mass flight or ethnic cleansing, revenge killings and punitive justice . The fact that Azerbaijan denied striking civilian targets on Tuesday, even as footage showed bombs landing in urban centers, does not bode well.

Responsibility for what comes next lies mainly in the hands of Aliyev and Putin’s roughly 2,000 peacekeepers. They are unlikely to be enough, and if Russia cannot do the job itself it should ask for help. The peaceful restoration of territorial control after ethnic cleansing has been achieved before, but that success is rare and not easy. Russia’s own record , in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, is poor — to say the least.

One model to follow could be the heavily armed United Nations peace-keeping force that was deployed to a region of Eastern Croatia that was roughly half the size of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the 1990s. The 5,000 strong UNTAES mission took administrative control of the region for two years, before handing full control to the returning Croatian authorities. The peacekeepers included both US and Russian troops, able to disarm and reassure Croats and Serbs alike.

Without that transition, the temptation for Azerbaijan to solve its Karabakh problem once and for all by encouraging ethnic-Armenian flight will be strong. If anyone can influence Aliyev, it’s his Turkish ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is gathering with other world leaders this week for the UN General Assembly. Erdogan has an opportunity to step up in New York, leveraging all sides to ensure that this long and bloody conflict can come to a humane end.

Marc Champion covers global politics. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg