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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to negotiate a truce in the two-week war between Azerbaijan and Armenia collapsed over the weekend. Clashes broke out between the two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus five minutes after the agreement reached by Azerbaijani and Armenian diplomats in Moscow went into effect at noon on Saturday. Shelling against civilian targets on both sides and bloodshed on the front lines and in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region continue to increase.
On October 9, the Kremlin had invited the delegations of the foreign ministries of Azerbaijan and Armenia to Moscow, stating: “The president of Russia is calling for a stop to the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh on humanitarian grounds to exchange corpses. and prisoners. “French President Emmanuel Macron, who has aggressively supported Armenia, also called for a ceasefire.
Armenian officials attended the talks, reversing their stated position that they would only attend the talks if a ceasefire was agreed to first. However, shortly before the talks began in Moscow, officials from both Azerbaijan and its main regional sponsor, Turkey, said they would not make concessions.
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin bluntly predicted that the Moscow talks would be a failure. “If they are only calling for a ceasefire, if they are only working towards a ceasefire, it will be nothing more than a repeat of what happened over the last 30 years,” he said. Reaffirming the Turkish government’s position that Armenia is illegally occupying Karabakh, Kalin added: “It will almost certainly fail if it does not also involve a detailed plan to end the occupation.”
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev delivered a televised address to the nation insisting that he would not make concessions to Armenia. Aliyev said: “The use of force in Azerbaijan changed the facts on the ground” and that has “demonstrated that there was a military solution to the dispute,” Reuters reported. He added that these negotiations were Armenia’s “last chance” to peacefully resolve the conflict.
Aliyev added that Azeri forces had seized the Hadrut, Chayli, Yukhari Guzlak, Gorazilli, Gishlag, Garajalli, Afandilar, Suleymanli and Sur communities in Karabakh, calling it a “historic victory”. He reported that the Armenian-controlled province of Fuzuli in Azerbaijan had also been surrounded and that the Azerbaijani forces had left a small escape route through which the Armenians exited.
After a ceasefire was briefly announced for midday on Saturday, fighting soon broke out again on both sides. Armenian officials accused Azeri troops of launching an assault at 12:05 pm, while Azeri officials accused Armenia of bombing civilian targets. Fighting escalated on Sunday, with AFP reporting artillery fire targeting the Azeri city of Barda and the Armenian city of Stepanakert in Nagorno-Karabakh. An Armenian missile also hit the second largest city in Azerbaijan, Ganja, killing nine people and wounding 34.
On Monday, Azeri and Armenian forces exchanged allegations of violations of the ceasefire, while both claimed to respect it, with Azeri forces accused of bombing the conflict zone and “large-scale hostilities” near Hadrut, and Armenian forces accused to bombard front-line areas of Azerbaijan.
Moscow and Tehran unsuccessfully called on Azerbaijan and Armenia to respect the ceasefire. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said: “Iran calls on the two sides to exercise more self-control, condemns missile attacks on vital infrastructure, residential areas of cities and the killing of civilians.” Khatibzadeh also said Iran could offer to host talks to achieve a “permanent and sustainable peace and solution.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: “We hope that the decisions that have been made will be rigorously observed by both parties,” adding that he hoped that the “all-night vigil” during which the agreement was reached ceasefire “not in vain”.
However, it appears that both Azerbaijan and Armenia have ignored the ceasefire and are prepared to escalate a conflict that is inextricably linked to the disastrous consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991.
In 1921, in the early years of Soviet Russia, Nagorno-Karabakh was an Armenian-majority region surrounded by Azeri areas. It was granted the status of autonomy within Azerbaijan. However, in the run-up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism, an armed conflict broke out amid the rise of ethnic nationalism and separatism in the Soviet bureaucracy. Azeri and Armenian forces fought for Nagorno-Karabakh, which also declared its independence, leading to a war from 1988 to 1994 that left 30,000 dead and more than 1 million displaced.
During the past three decades, conflict has periodically flared up again, defying all attempts to negotiate a lasting settlement and underscoring the reactionary and unworkable nature of the nation-state system. Ethnic-Turkish Azeri forces attempted to retake the Karabakh, which Armenian forces have controlled since 1994. This conflict is now exacerbated by all the ethnic and military tensions sparked by three decades of US-led imperialist wars in the region since the dissolution. of the Soviet Union. Union.
The Caucasus, located between the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and China to the east; Iran and Turkey to the south; the Black Sea and Europe to the west; and Russia to the north is now the focal point of explosive geostrategic tensions. These point to the very real danger that multiple wars and conflicts in the region could merge into one global war between the great powers.
No less important among them is the US war campaign that threatens China as Beijing develops its “Belt and Road” global infrastructure plan. In an Oct. 1 Harvard University report titled “The United States Should Watch Rising Chinese Investment in the South Caucasus,” analyst Daniel Shapiro wrote that China’s presence in the region “may affect energy security. of the United States and other important interests. ” He added that for Chinese companies, the region is an “excellent logistics hub for expansion into the Caucasian, EU and Central Asian markets.”
Shapiro denounced that China’s activities in the region “threaten several vital interests of the United States,” including maintaining “a balance of power in Europe and Asia.” [compatible] with an ongoing leadership role for the United States ”and ensuring the“ stability of the major global systems, ”including the financial and oil markets.
US officials have not made major statements about the ongoing Karabakh war as chaos erupts in the US political system over President Donald Trump’s threat not to respect the outcome of next month’s presidential elections. However, they have given substantial US $ 100 million military aid to Azerbaijan, which made significant arms purchases from Israel and Turkey, at least partially reversing the military balance with Armenia, according to certain analyzes. Armenia, for its part, has had the support of Russia and France.
Reports that Syrian Islamic “rebel” militias and Turkish security companies are sending fighters to Azerbaijan, on the borders of Russia and Iran, further exacerbate these tensions. Tehran and Moscow, which have backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime against these militias in NATO’s decade-long war in Syria, fear that these fighters could spread Turkish or Islamist nationalist demands in Azeri-majority regions of Iran. or Muslim regions of the country. North Caucasus in Russia.
French imperialism’s support for Armenia is part of its broader conflict with the Turkish government, which has backed militias opposed to France’s proxies in the Libyan civil war sparked by the 2011 NATO war in that country. In recent years, this has escalated into a conflict over oil resources not only in Libya, but also in submarine oil deposits in the Mediterranean, where Turkey, Greece and Cyprus have submitted rival claims. In this, France has aggressively backed Greece, which recently bought billions of euros in French fighter jets and military supplies to prepare for war with Turkey.
This conflict flared up again yesterday, when Turkey announced that it would send the oil drilling ship Oruç Reis to explore for oil in waters also claimed by Greece. The Greek Foreign Ministry, whose ships came close to repeatedly firing on Turkish ships this summer, called this a “serious new escalation.”
The entire region is a tinderbox, with multiple conflicts, each threatening to erupt into a general conflagration, underscoring the urgent need to unify the working class across national lines in an international anti-war movement. capitalism and imperialism.
