More than 100 dead in armed clashes between Armenians and Azeris. What’s behind the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict VIDEO INFOGRAPHICS

“Armenian forces retaliated against an Azerbaijani offensive in various sectors of the front line, and the enemy suffered heavy casualties,” the Armenian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.

Azerbaijan “has carried out massive artillery fire against Armenian positions and is preparing for a new attack,” a ministry spokesman Artrun Hovhanisian wrote on Facebook.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry announced that it had retaliated against an “attempted Armenian counterattack to regain lost positions” in Nagorno Karabah and “fierce fighting” overnight from Monday to Tuesday.

“Azeri forces continued an offensive against the city of Fizuli, destroying four enemy tanks, an armored vehicle and killing 10 soldiers on Tuesday morning,” the ministry said in a statement.

The official toll from those bloody clashes rose to at least 100 dead on Tuesday, including 11 civilians, nine Azerbaijanis and two Armenians. However, the true figure could be higher, in the context in which both camps claim to have killed hundreds of enemy soldiers.

The southern Caucasus is suddenly on the brink of war again. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict, which has lasted for more than 30 years, has erupted these days. There are dozens of deaths on both sides, including civilians, as both sides are shelling civilian towns, including the Azerbaijani side that is bombing the capital of the unrecognized Karabakh entity, Stepanakert. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was the bloodiest from the start compared to other similar conflicts in the post-Soviet space. During the so-called hot period of this conflict, that is, 1989-1994, a total of about 30,000 people died.

Two decades later, Azerbaijan is much more prosperous, with a much better equipped army and new military technologies, two or three times greater than Armenia. Also, analyst Octavian Milewski writes for RFI, the effect of the coronavirus pandemic that has distracted key players is mainly the United States and France, which are part of the Minsk Group under the auspices of the OSCE to negotiate the solution of the Karabakh conflict.

In fact, in July this year, for 4 days there were already intense armed clashes, but inexplicably not on the line of contact between Karabakh and Azerbaijan, but north of the breakaway region, on the direct border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Then it was noted that Azerbaijan probably tested Yerevan’s responsiveness, but also the reactionary power of the international community.

Competition between Russia and Turkey

Nagorno-Karabakh is a region attached to Azerbaijan in 1923, in a strategy devised by Stalin to hold the small nations included in the Soviet Union captive in the long term. On the territory of the Stalin-designed enclaves, such as Transnistria, South Ostecia, Abkhazia or Nagorno-Karabakh, bloody conflicts occurred in the early 1990s, when the USSR collapsed. They were later frozen, following fragile agreements led by Russia, which in turn has an interest in perpetuating such conflicts, in order to control entire regions that it considers strategic.

This is the case in the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia meet, a region at the intersection of geopolitical fault lines, energy grids and trade routes. The same interests lead Russia to keep the area under surveillance, especially as Azerbaijan begins to become an energy supplier for Europe and Turkey, and Armenia falls outside the infrastructure networks where Baku, Tbilisi and Ankara have been working for a long time. .

Russia, a traditional ally of Armenia, where it has military and sophisticated weapons, insists on keeping this frozen conflict intact, which it can unfreeze as long as it has a certain interest. Moscow, on the other hand, also has strong relations with Azerbaijan and enjoys preferential prices for the hydrocarbons it buys from Azerbaijanis and resells in Europe. According to information compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and published in 2020, Russia has secured all Armenian arms imports in the past five years. At the same time, however, the Russians are Azerbaijan’s second largest arms supplier, with 31% of imports, after Israel (60%).

This strategy enables Moscow to become indispensable and maintain its role as arbiter in the South Caucasus, a role that Turkey, the other regional power, would also like to be able to play. Turkey, on the other hand, is Azerbaijan’s supporter of the “two states, one nation” formula. Turkey believes that citizens of Azerbaijan should call themselves Azerbaijani Turks, and that their language, which is very similar to Turkish, should be considered the same, Azerbaijani Turkish. The activation of tensions between the two Caucasus neighbors comes amid increased competition between Turks and Russians in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Libya and Syria, where their geostrategic interests are divergent.

Regional implications

The Nagorno Karabakh conflict can have real implications on a continental scale, especially if key players supporting either side are involved in the conflict. Russia is in a military alliance with Armenia, through which it should defend itself if attacked. Russia also has an important military base in Armenia and has equipped the Armenian army with Iskander systems capable of reaching any geographical point in Azerbaijan, especially the capital, Baku. The same can be said of Turkey and Azerbaijan, which not only call themselves “sister states”, but also have very close military cooperation. Furthermore, Iran is no stranger to the armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On the one hand, Tehran supports Yerevan politically, geographically and economically, and on the other hand, the Azerbaijani minority in Iran is no less so. 25 million people.