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The end came surprisingly quickly: The military conflict in the southern Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan came to a halt on Tuesday night, with a ceasefire agreement between Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The agreement comes just one day after Azerbaijan’s decisive victory in the fight for the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region: the capture of the strategically and symbolically important city of Shusha (Armenian: Shushi). The conflict had killed more than 100 civilians and thousands of militants on both sides since the end of September.
The short document, a joint “statement” by President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, was first published by the Kremlin. Presumably, it will fix the new situation in the South Caucasus in the coming years. What are its key points?
The most important thing is that the agreement is like this strongit can hold. It contains the dispatch of a peacekeeping mission made up of almost 2,000 Russian soldiers. All the truces agreed to so far have failed after a very short time, probably not this one. None of the warring factions can afford to ignore the presence of Moscow troops. It is initially set for five years.
As expected, this is reflected The military defeat of Armenia clearly reflected in the document. Azerbaijan must stop its troops on the current front line and advance no further. But Armenia agrees to evacuate the territories it occupied as a buffer zone around Nagorno-Karabakh proper in the early 1990s. The autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh (which renounced Azerbaijan), predominantly Armenian in population, was supplemented generously with seven additional districts from which Armenia had expelled the Azerbaijani population.
Good luck in bad luck for Armenia: after all, it is the Turkey, which actively supported Azerbaijan in this war, did not participate in the agreement. In any case, she is not officially mentioned in the document or signed. There is no mention of the Turkish peacekeepers, a nightmare for the Armenian side. The absence of Turkey is the most striking element in the document and, at the same time, the most controversial.
Because both Turkey and Azerbaijan are saying now that the Turkish armed forces will very well play a role in peacekeeping, in the “Peacekeeping Center for monitoring the ceasefire” that the document says is going to be created. . “There is not a word about this in the statement, there is no agreement between the three parties, the presence of Turkish soldiers in Karabakh was not agreed,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But there is no doubt that Turkey’s influence in the region increased after that war. Will there really be unofficial Turkish peacekeepers alongside official Russian peacekeepers?
Two aisles were agreed, which make clear the interdependence of the parties with each other and with Russia. On the one hand, Armenia must continue to have access to the part of Nagorno-Karabakh that is still under its control. This five-kilometer-wide corridor is secured by Russian troops. Conversely, however, Armenia must grant Azerbaijan access to the Azerbaijani enclave Nakhichevan for the first time, in the form of a transit road that runs through Armenian territory and the traffic of which must be controlled by Russian border troops from the FSB national intelligence service. Since Nakhichevan, for its part, borders Turkey, Azerbaijan would have a direct connection with its friend Turkey for the first time since its independence.
And so the document writes at the end Russia’s growing role firmly. Unlike Turkey, Russia has largely stayed out of the conflict, despite close ties with Armenia. Now it not only has a significantly greater impact in Armenia. It also has a military presence on the territory of Azerbaijan, the only state in the South Caucasus where it has not yet had troops.
And finally, the text leaves many important open questions – As expected in the case of a ceasefire negotiated under time pressure: What legal status is promised that part of Nagorno-Karabakh that remains under Armenian control? The text is silent on this.
And it addresses the return of refugees and displaced people; it should take place under the direction of the UNHCR refugee agency. But it is unclear to whom and how the return will be made possible, and how safe returnees may feel.
