- Filip Dąb-Mirowski
The third Karabahk War.
The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh never seems to subside; at most, it periodically lost intensity. However, the latest turning point heralds the end of the independence of this quasi-state.
Since early September, the internet infosphere has been flooded with photos and videos showing Azeri soldiers and military equipment moving towards the border with Armenia. This has been accompanied by reports of minor border incidents, including exchanges of fire, followed by mutual accusations of provocation.
Today with certainty, we can say that this was the prelude to the third war of Nagorno-Karabakh, a lightning war. Just 24 hours after the conflict began, the defenders of 'Artsakh', as the region is called by its inhabitants, were forced to lay down their arms on Baku's terms. How did this happen? What does it mean for the region, and why does it not have to be the final flashpoint in relations between Yerevan and Baku?
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The history of this conflict has essentially been ongoing since the beginning of the 20th century, reigniting every time empires weaken and the geopolitical balance of power changes. We discussed it in more detail during the Second Karabakh War, in the November 2020 episode.
The fact is that the situation between the two states has remained tense ever since. Nagorno-Karabakh is surrounded by territories occupied (or 'recaptured', if you prefer) by Azerbaijan, and is only connected to Armenia by a single road running through the Lachin Corridor.
So first, let us briefly recall the territorial outcome of the war in 2020. On the map.
The pink area is the territory of Armenia. The light green - Azerbaijan. The orange is the borders of Nagorno Karabakh until 19 September. The blue colour is the area that was forcibly retaken by the Azeris as a result of the 44-day war in 2020. This area, together with the dark green colour, is the area ceded by the Azeris to the Armenians as a result of the First Karabakh War which ended in 1994. If you look carefully, you will also find the purple colour - the 'Lachin Corridor', the road to Armenia through Azeri territory negotiated in the 2020 Agreement. Despite the large Armenian population in the areas - blue, dark green and orange - they are formally Azerbaijani territory.
For the record, the mixed-up borders are the legacy of the Soviets, who arbitrarily established these borders in the name of 'divide and rule' strategy.
Armenia's defeat allowed Azerbaijan to assume a dominant position in bilateral relations, which the authorities in Yerevan sought to balance by relying on its traditional relationship with Moscow as protector. The 2020 war ended with an agreement whose guarantor was supposed to be the Russian Federation, so it was up to the Russian military to uphold it, a difficult task from the start, not least because of Azeri appetites.
The humiliating terms of the agreement for the Armenians met with public opposition. In particular, the commitment to return the territories seized in the First Karabakh War, combined with the evacuation of the inhabitants. Protesters in Yerevan broke into parliament and attacked the speaker, while Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced his resignation. In the end, he barely held on to power, winning a showdown not only with outraged voters but also with the so-called Karabakh clan. Meanwhile, the first clashes after the November 2020 war broke out as early as December, when Armenian troops entered two towns that were supposed to have been handed over to Azerbaijan.
However, this was the exception to the rule, which in the following months became incidents of exchange of fire and constant violations of Armenian territory by Azerbaijani troops. It is estimated that by mid-2023 Azerbaijan had occupied between 50 and 215 square kilometres of Armenian territory. This has mainly been done to gain tactically advantageous positions in the event of a resumption of regular hostilities, although there is one known case of an attempt to gain control of a gold mine.
The biggest escalation took place in September 2022. Both sides exchanged artillery fire, while troops clashed in the border areas. Contrary to appearances, the fighting did not take place on Artsakh territory, but in neighbouring southern Armenia. In particular, the Azeri attacks targeted the province of Syunik, a gateway to the south, including Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan and Iran, which is vital to Yerevan. With border crossings with Turkey and Azerbaijan closed, Armenia's only links to the world are through Georgia and Iran.
Significantly, during the fighting, Azerbaijani forces fired on Russian 'mirotvorets' meaning 'peacekeepers', including FSB officers guarding the border. However, this was met with a passive Russian response. Each of these clashes was resolved through negotiations, usually with the help of international actors: France, the Russian Federation, Turkey, the United States, the European Union or the OSCE (Minsk Group). Baku deliberately used the argument of violence to force Yerevan to make further concessions. Despite the uncomfortable position, Prime Minister Pashinyan did not want to agree to them. Apart from the corridor, the most difficult issue to resolve remained the demarcation of the border and the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan wanted to reintegrate in its entirety.
While the exact course of the border is a relatively flexible issue, the merger of Azeri territories, including Nakhchivan, is non-negotiable for Baku. President Ilham Aliyev himself has announced that the so-called Zangezur corridor will be seized by force if necessary. The creation of a land link is a dream not only of President Aliyev but also of Turkish President Reccep Erdogan. It is an indispensable element in the construction of a Union of Turkic States, uniting all Eurasian Turanian peoples in one political organism in a spirit similar to the European Union, but under the clear leadership of Ankara.
Although Armenia has agreed to open the road to traffic, it has no intention of relinquishing control over it. So, in December 2022, so-called 'environmental activists' of Azeri origin blocked the Lachin corridor. Initially, only medicines and humanitarian aid were allowed through, but from June 2023 the blockade was taken over by the Azeri army, de facto cutting Artsakh off from Armenia and exacerbating the growing humanitarian crisis.
Since then, the pressure on Yerevan has steadily increased. Negotiations have become all the more intense as they have taken place at three different levels. At the end of 2021, the European Commission was involved through Charles Michel, but they were also conducted individually with the participation of Russia and the United States of America. All these formats met several times this year, and it even seemed that an agreement was not far away. As recently as mid-September, Azerbaijan unblocked the Nagorno-Karabakh corridor by allowing humanitarian supplies to pass through. But Aliyev seemed to have grown tired of waiting. On 19 September, Azerbaijani forces began shelling Artsakh territory, accusing Armenians of terrorism in a statement. The aim of the 'anti-terrorist operation' was supposed to be the demilitarisation of the area, which can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as the final elimination of Nagorno-Karabakh's independence.
But why has Russia, which is responsible for complying with the terms of the agreement, including maintaining traffic through the Lachin corridor, remained completely passive towards Azerbaijan? It seems that it was simply too weak to enter into a confrontation.
Even after the end of the Second Karabakh War in November 2020, the Russian Federation, although involved in many directions, still appeared to be a player with considerable potential to stabilise the situation. Admittedly, Turkey's support for Azerbaijan meant that Russian influence was beginning to be crowded out by Ankara, so Moscow shrewdly maintained its position as a regional arbiter.
Yet after February 2022, everything changed. Together with the full-scale attack on Ukraine and the clear defeat suffered by the Russian army at the end of the summer, the weakening of Russia's military capabilities became obvious to all. At the same time, unprecedented Western sanctions and ostracism narrowed Moscow's international room for manoeuvre, and the costs of the war put a strain on the budget.
Russia's impotence and lack of effective power-projection tools in the peripheries prompted regional actors to seek to improve their own geopolitical positions, with Turkey and Azerbaijan leading the way. This shift also provided the basis for the entry of the United States and the European Union into the Caucasus arena.
The aforementioned fighting on the border of Syunik province in September 2022 took place shortly after Russian troops had been crushed by Ukrainian forces in the memorable Izyum-Kupyansk operation in the Kharkiv region. The Azerbaijanis soberly assessed that the Russian frontal deficits were also being made up with the help of the troops deployed in the Caucasus, and therefore decided to test the Russian reactions to the various types of armed provocations carried out on the line of contact between the parties, including the shelling of the 'Mirotvorets' forces.
This brings us to the blockade of the Lachin Corridor. The pretext for maintaining it was the alleged smuggling of arms to the Karabakh militias, which the authorities in Baku accused Armenia of. Azerbaijan went virtually unpunished and the Russians remained passive, to Yerevan's fury - as expressed, for example, in an official Foreign Ministry statement. It is hardly surprising that this attitude encouraged the Azeris to 'reach out for more'. The gap in military potential between rich Azerbaijan and poor Armenia continues to widen.
Until recently, Yerevan had pinned its hopes on the security guarantees provided by the CSTO, so-called ‘Russian NATO’, but the organisation has proved completely ineffective, even though Armenia chaired the organisation from 2021-2022. This apparent impotence at a time of imminent threat to Armenian territory has caused much frustration among Armenians and recently led Prime Minister Nikola Pashinian to admit that a one-dimensional bet on Russia had proved to be a strategic mistake. He said this in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Reppublica.
Yerevan refused to take part in the CSTO exercises that began in Belarus in early September and recalled its permanent representative to the organisation, Viktor Bijagov. It is highly likely that Armenia's next step will be to leave the alliance. Pashinyan is making it clear that he is interested in closer cooperation with the West as a more reliable partner, a move expected by his electorate.
Symbolic of the shift in policy towards Russia was the introduction of a proposal in the Armenian parliament to ratify the Rome Statute, which would recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This would be a blow to Vladimir Putin, against whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant.
At the same time, humanitarian aid was sent to Ukraine, personally 'delivered' by the Prime Minister's wife, Anna Hakobyan. The announcement of the Eagle Partner 2023 joint military exercise with the Americans also came as a surprise.
And so we come to the third war over Nagorno-Karabakh. At first, Baku's excuse was the need to carry out manoeuvres, but the Armenians did not believe it. No wonder, because in 2020, before the September attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani troops did exactly the same thing, moving seamlessly from exercises to invasion. The same thing happened before the September 2022 clashes. So the likelihood that it would be similar this time was high, and we saw the effects very quickly.
The operation to retake Nagorno-Karabakh began on 19 September, and in less than 24 hours it was all over. The authorities of the unrecognised republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, seeing the lack of support from both Yerevan and Moscow, were forced to sit down for talks with the Azeris in Yevlakh. At the same time, the evacuation of Armenians from Karabakh through the base of the Russian peacekeeping contingent was underway.
On 20 September, at around 13:00 local time, a cessation of hostilities was announced and an agreement was reached, which was the de facto surrender of the Artsakh army. The terms of the agreement provided for the disbanding and complete disarmament of the Artsakh army, the withdrawal of heavy equipment and weapons. All this took place under the auspices of Russian peacekeepers. The fighting lasted 24 hours and, according to the Karabakh side, left about 200 Armenians dead and more than 400 wounded. The local Armenian population (officially 120,000, but in reality fewer) was offered by Azerbaijan to remain in Nagorno-Karabakh on condition that they accept Azerbaijani citizenship or leave their homes and move to Armenia. Whereas, the Armenian authorities have announced that they are ready to accept Armenian residents from Karabakh. As a result, a mass exodus of Armenians from Artsakh is currently underway.
As a result of the Azerbaijani operation and the reaction of the Armenian authorities, massive protests erupted in the streets of Yerevan - some of them against Pashynian, who was accused of treason, while others took place in front of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, where people accused Moscow of abandoning Armenia.
With the troops of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic left to fend for themselves, such an outcome was inevitable. Even during the fighting, on 19 September, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that Armenian troops would not take part in the war.
Nor did the Russians have the resources or the will to respond. The forces of the Russian Southern Military District, which had been responsible for all operations in the Caucasus, were decimated by the Ukrainian offensive in Zaporizhia. The Russians, therefore, did not have the means to stop Azerbaijan, preferring not to inflame the situation by accepting the facts. They are counting on maintaining their influence among the Karabakh elite, who will continue to participate in Armenian political life even after leaving Artsakh. Russian military bases on Armenian territory will also remain a sticking point in future relations with Yerevan.
Azerbaijan thus appears to have finally solved the Nagorno-Karabakh problem, but this is not the end of the 'tidying up' that Baku wants to do in its immediate vicinity. The Nakhchivan exclave, to which the Azeris want to dig a land bridge through Armenian territory, remains a target. If needed, to be resolved by force.
But Azerbaijan's aspirations to unite the whole country have provoked a nervous reaction from Iran, on whose northern border the Zangezur corridor runs. Tehran's attitude and support for Armenia could be crucial in establishing a new balance of power in the region. For many, the 'Zangezur Corridor' is a red line for Iran. While Tehran has remained passive on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, an Azeri offensive in the Zangezur Corridor could be met with Iranian intervention.
Iran has reiterated on several occasions that it will not agree to any territorial changes in Armenia and, therefore, will not agree to the Azeri corridor. Turkey would certainly be involved in any conflict between the two countries. The tacit support could also be expected from Israel, which has long supplied Baku with arms and is likely using Azerbaijani territory to conduct operations against the ayatollahs' regime.
There are many indications that the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute is not the end of the bitter relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Baku wants to reunite its divided territory and has the financial and military resources to do so, which exceeds Yerevan's capabilities. However, an offensive in the Zangezur corridor would significantly increase the scale of the conflict and could trigger the intervention of major regional and even global players, further making the Caucasus a never-ending source of tension.
