The Karabakh Pendulum | Paper

Rome. During a speech to the nation, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said yesterday that the conflict against Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh will continue because “this is not just a war. This is a decisive battle for our lives. ” The clashes that began in July and became increasingly intense in late September in the Armenian-majority enclave on Azerbaijani territory have now moved to the cities, on Sunday Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second largest, ballistic missiles was bombed. reached the centers inhabited and by the two nations of the South Caucasus is a continuous threat and attack. There has not been an escalation of the conflict of this magnitude since 2016, but even then the attacks on both sides had lasted four days and by the fifth Azeris and Armenians had returned to negotiation. This situation is called the Karabakh pendulum, when the conflict alternates with periods of negotiations.. But as Sergei Markedonov of the Carnegie Moscow writes, this time the pendulum seems to have stopped and the situation seems to be dangerously immobilized by the armed clashes between the two nations. There is something different than in 2016, and it is the attitude of Russia that in recent years has always been the diplomatic engine that, when the pendulum swung towards conflict, was able to immediately move it towards negotiations. Moscow’s mediation has been the motor of this pendulum for years, Russia has two military bases in Armenia and the two nations are also linked by a series of bilateral agreements, but this time, in regulating the confrontations it seems unable to find one. solution. . Azerbaijan has strong support from Turkey, a new variant of the conflict that Russia was not used to taking into account: it was the only one in the area who had to reflect and lead the negotiations. But it is certainly not the first time that Russians and Turks have been forced to share the same space, sometimes they do so in a more bellicose way, sometimes in a more negotiating way. The two nations have learned to compromise, they know how to deal with each other, but in Nagorno Karabakh they seem to fail. The areas in which Moscow and Ankara coexist are no less complicated than the South Caucasus, a compromise they found in Libya, Syria, and also in Syrian Kurdistan they managed to reach an agreement.